While at college his companion was the scholarly Gabriel Harvey, who exerted no small influence in shaping Spenser's future career. After leaving college, Spenser went to the north of England, and having been rejected by a lady whom he calls Rosalind, and to whom he had avowed his love, he again repaired to London, where his friend Harvey introduced him to the chivalric and accomplished Sir Philip Sidney, who in turn encouraged the poet and inspired him to grader efforts.

Spenser's first great poem was a pastoral called The Shepherd's Calendar, which he dedicated to Sidney. Sir Philip urged him to write something higher and better than this pastoral, and Spenser then, after ten years, produced the Faerie Queene, his grandest work, an extended allegory, full of half-concealed beauty and noted for its wealth of imagery, in which the virtues of temperance, chastity, justice, etc. are set forth in the persons of knights. The poem was dedicated to the Queen, and was written in a peculiar versification, since known as the "Spenserian stanza."

In 1582 the Queen gave to Spenser a grant of land in Ireland, but also obliged him to live on it; which really banished him from England. He married at the age of forty-one. Four years later he was driven from his home by the Irish rebellion; his castle was burned, and with it one of his children. Crushed by his grief, he fled with his family to England, and in January, 1599, the gentle and sensitive poet died. He was buried with great ceremony by the side of Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.

The greatest of Spenser's other poems were Hymns of Heavenly Love, Heavenly Beauty, his admirable Sonnets, and Epithalamion, the grandest marriage-song in the language.

CRITICISM BY TAINE.

SPENSER was pre-eminently a creator and a dreamer, and that most naturally, instinctively, unceasingly. But what distinguishes him from all others is the mcde of his imagination. Generally, with a poet his mind ferments vehemently and by fits and starts; his ideas gather, jostle each other, suddenly appear in masses and heaps, and burst forth in sharp, piercing, concentrative words; it seems that they need these sudden accumulations to imitate the unity and life-like energy of the objects which they produce. At least almost all the poets of that time, Shakespeare at their head, act thus.

unawares.

Spenser remains calm in the fervor of invention. The visions which would be fever to another leave him at peace. They come and unfold themselves before him easily, entire, uninterrupted, without starts. He is epic. -that is, a narrator--not a singer like an ode-writer, nor a mimic like a play-writer. No modern is more like Homer. Like Homer and the great epic-writers, he only presents consecutive and noble, almost classical, images -so nearly ideas that the mind seizes them unaided and Like Homer, he is always simple and clear; he makes no leaps; he omits nc arguments; he robs no word of its primitive and ordinary meanings; he preserves the natural sequence of ideas. Like Homer, again, he is redundant, ingenuous, even childish. He says everything; he puts down reflections which we have made beforehand; he repeats without limit his grand ornamental epithets. We can see that he beholds objects in a beautiful uniform light, with infinite. detail; that he wishes to show all this detail, never fearing to see his happy dream change or disappear; that he traces its outline with a regular movement, never

hurrying or slacking. He is even a little prolix--too uninindful of the public, too ready to lose himself and dream about the things he beholds.

His thought expands in vast repeated comparisons, like those of the old Ionic poet. He develops all the ideas which he handles. All his phrases become periods. Instead of compressing, he expands.

Magic is the mould of his mind, and impresses its shape on all that he imagines or thinks. Involuntarily, he robs objects of their ordinary form. If he looks at a landscape, after an instant he sees it quite differently. He carries it unconsciously into an enchanted land; the azure heaven sparkles like a canopy with flowers, a biped population flutters in the balmy air, palaces of jasper shine among the trees, radiant ladies appear on carved balconies above galleries of emerald. This unconscious toil of mind is like the slow crystallization of Nature. A moist twig is cast into the bottom of a mine, and is brought out again a hoop of diamonds.

THE BOWER OF BLISS.

NOTE. The following extract, in which the spelling is modernized, is taken from the Faerie Queene. It is but a portion of the beautiful description of "The Bower of Bliss."

There the most dainty paradise on ground
Itself doth offer to his sober eye,

In which all pleasures plenteously abound,
And none does others' happiness envy;
The painted flowers, the trees upshooting high
The dales for shade, the hills for breathing space,
The trembling groves, the crystal running by;

ANALYSIS.-2. sober eye. What figure here?
3. Why plenteously, rather than plentifully?
4. Is none in the singular or the plural number?
5, 6, 7. Name and explain the figures in these lines.
7. The crystal running by. Give the meaning.

b

And that which all fair works doth most aggrace, The art which all that wrought, appeared in no place.

One would have thought-so cunningly the rude
And scorned parts were mingled with the fine-
That Nature had for wantonness ensued
Art, and that Art at Nature did repine;
So striving each th' other to undermine,
Each did the other's work more beautify;
So differing both in wills, agreed in fine:
So all agreed through sweet diversity,
This garden to adorn with all variety.

And in the midst of all a fountain stood

10

15

ANALYSIS.-8. And that. Give grammatical construction of that. What is the meaning of aggrace?

10. What is the object of would have thought?

10, 11. so cunningly. . . . fine. Give grammatical construction. 13. did repine. Is this the emphatic form, or the ancient form of the past tense?

14. 15. Give the grammatical construction of each. 17 Name the modifiers of agreed.

18. to adorn. Of what is this an adjunct ?

What figure runs through the second stanza?

19 22. Rewrite these lines in natural order.

23. Most goodly. Modernize.

24. In what case is shapes?

25. of which. Should this not be of whom?

26. To fly about. Should this be to fly or to flee?

27. embay. The word is now obsolete. It meant to bathe.

That wight, who did not well advised it view,
Would surely deem it to be ivy true:

Low his lascivious arms adown did creep,

That themselves dipping in the silver dew,

Their fleecy flowers they fearfully did steep,

35

Which drops of crystal seemed for wantonness to weep.

That through the waves one might the bottom see,
All paved beneath with jasper shining bright,
That seemed the fountain in that sea did sail upright.

45

And all the margin round about was set
With shady laurel trees, thence to defend
The sunny beams, which on the billows beat,
And those which therein bathed might offend.

ANALYSIS.—28, 29. Transpose and rewrite these two lines. 34. silver dew. Explain and point out the figure.

35. fleecy flowers.

What figure? Notice the alliteration. antecedent of which? In what case is drops! What is the modern word?

36. What is the 37. did well.

38. fair to see.

That is, fair to be seen-so used by poetic license.

39. Note the use of The before which. What is the meaning of laver?

41 Parse like.

41 All paved.

What figure in the line?

Parse all; also beneath and bright.

45 Reconstruct this line so as to develop the meaning.

46. Parse round about.

47. to defend, to keep off. Give the etymology of the word. Give

he meaning of thence.

48. 49. Name the antecedent of which in each line.

49. Explain the meaning of this line.