The Faerie Queen

By Edmund Spenser

Considered to be one of the most difficult poems in the history of the English language, "The Faerie Queen" by Edmund Spenser is a marvelous epic poem depicting the virtues of the legendary King Arthur and his knights in a mythical place called Faerieland. Spenser based his interpretation of the virtues on those named by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Each one of the seven books discusses a different hero who displays one of these virtues; however, this entire collection was meant to be a tribute to Queen Elizabeth and the Tudor family. The stories are intricate and sometimes hard to understand. The language follows Spenserian prose and is intentionally archaic; Spenser wanted his work to have a mythical feel rather than being a modern piece. Each work was specifically chosen to evoke a certain feeling or image, allowing Spenser to make the world of Faerieland have an enchanting feeling. All readers who make their way through the text find that they are rewarded by the epic poem's masterful plots and inventive setting. Many refer to "The Faerie Queen" as early science fiction, since Spenser merges a mystical Faerieland with Arthurian legend. Students of history and literature will enjoy this timeless classic for its challenging rhetoric, but also for its vivid depictions and stunning allegorical significance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Jan 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781420950441

Edmund Spenser

Edmund Spenser (1552 - 1599) was an English poet considered to be one of the greatest poets in the English language. While Spenser would published more than a dozen works in his lifetime he is best known for his epic poem, The Faerie Queene. Dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I, the book is both one of the longest poems and most influential in the English language.

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THE FAERIE QUEEN

BY EDMUND SPENSER

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5043-4

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5044-1

This edition copyright © 2014

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CONTENTS

LIFE OF EDMUND SPENSER.

NOTE ON THE FAERIE QUEEN.

A LETTER OF THE AUTHOR'S

VERSES ADDRESSED BY THE AUTHOR OF THE FAERIE QUEEN TO SEVERAL NOBLEMEN, ETC.

THE FIRST BOOK

CANTO I.

CANTO II.

CANTO III.

CANTO IV.

CANTO V.

CANTO VI.

CANTO VII.

CANTO VIII.

CANTO IX.

CANTO X.

CANTO XI.

CANTO XII.

THE SECOND BOOK

CANTO I.

CANTO II.

CANTO III.

CANTO IV.

CANTO V.

CANTO VI.

CANTO VII.

CANTO VIII.

CANTO IX.

CANTO X.

CANTO XI.

CANTO XII.

THE THIRD BOOK

CANTO I.

CANTO II.

CANTO III.

CANTO IV.

CANTO V.

CANTO VI.

CANTO VII.

CANTO VIII.

CANTO IX.

CANTO X.

CANTO XI.

CANTO XII.

THE FOURTH BOOK

CANTO I.

CANTO II.

CANTO III.

CANTO IV.

CANTO V.

CANTO VI.

CANTO VII.

CANTO VIII.

CANTO IX.

CANTO X.

CANTO XI.

CANTO XII.

THE FIFTH BOOK

CANTO I.

CANTO II.

CANTO III.

CANTO IV.

CANTO V.

CANTO VI.

CANTO VII.

CANTO VIII.

CANTO IX.

CANTO X.

CANTO XI.

CANTO XII.

THE SIXTH BOOK

CANTO I.

CANTO II.

CANTO III.

CANTO IV.

CANTO V.

CANTO VI.

CANTO VII.

CANTO VIII.

CANTO IX.

CANTO X.

CANTO XI.

CANTO XII.

TWO CANTOS OF MUTABILITY

CANTO VI.

CANTO VII.

CANTO VIII. (Imperfect.)

LIFE OF EDMUND SPENSER.

Those familiar with London and London life in the second half of the nineteenth century, will more or less consciously take a Carlylean view of its intellectually productive capability, and affirm that no poet could be born there. Yet it may be questioned whether, in times past, London did not hold to the rest of these Islands, not numerically alone, but in activity and intensity of material life, a much more important relation than it does at present. In many senses, London was far more conspicuously the centre of the kingdom at a time when everything circulated to it, and little or nothing from it, than in these days, when the inward and the outward currents fairly compete with each other, and the facilities of intercommunication, the growth of independent political life, have destroyed the commercial and intellectual monopoly which in the older days the metropolis enjoyed. Certain it is, nevertheless, that London produced three of England's greatest Poets; and if the fourth, Shakespeare, did not draw his first or his last breath in the capital, at least he spent there the most important part of his life, and made the little fortune on which he quietly waited for death at Stratford-on-Avon. Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, however, indubitably were born in London; the first and the last of that splendid trio were Londoners most of their days—men of the Court, men of the council, men at head-quarters. Spenser's future fate led him afield into lonely and rough places; but London claims the honour of giving him birth. We have his own word for the fact; for in a poem entitled Prothalamion written to celebrate the double marriage of the two honourable and virtuous Ladies, the Lady Elizabeth and the Lady Katherine Somerset, daughters to the right honourable the Earl of Worcester, Spenser says—describing the progress of the two Swans who represent the brides, with their attendant train of nymphs—

"At length they all to merry London came,

To merry London, my most kindly nurse,

That to me gave this life's first native source,

Though from another place I take my name,

A house of ancient fame:"

Some now wholly unrecognisable or demolished house "in East Smithfield, by the Tower, saw the poet ushered into this world, towards the close of the year 1552. (See The Canterbury Tales and Faerie Queene, note 1, page 618.) The general belief is, that his parents were in indifferent circumstances; but little doubt is entertained regarding the respectability, if not even the nobility, of their original condition. Repeatedly, in dedications prefixed to his minor poems, Spenser claims kindred with the Spencers of Althorpe, in Northamptonshire—from whom the noble houses of Spencer and Marlborough took their rise. In 1590, he dedicates Muiopotmos to Lady Carey, the second daughter of Sir John Spencer; next year, he dedicates The Tears of the Muses" to Lady Strange, Sir John's sixth daughter, afterwards Countess of Derby; and, in both cases, the poet makes carefully distinct reference to his relationship—a claim which does not seem to have been repudiated, and which, in the brilliant but too brief days of his stay in London as the friend of Sidney and Leicester, we may reasonably suppose to have been acknowledged with satisfaction and even pride.

From whatever parentage he sprang, then, or whatever were the worldly circumstances of his immediate ancestors about the time of his birth, Spenser appears to have come of gentle lineage. Even in absence of any direct or collateral testimonies to that effect, we might almost be disposed to believe it on the strength of a single stanza in The Faerie Queen—the first in the fourth canto of the second book (page 206)—where the poet asserts for gentle blood a peculiar possession of the skill to ride But the branch of the Spenser family with which Edmund was immediately connected, was not that to whose daughters he inscribed his dedications, but that of the Spensers, or Le Spensers, of Hurstwood, near Burnley, in eastern Lancashire. A small domain, called the Spensers, exists to this day, in the Forest of Pendle, about three miles north of Hurstwood; and it has been noticed that, in the churchyards and parish registers of the district around the Spensers, the not very usual Christian names of Edmund and Laurence abound—those being familiar names in the pedigree of the poet's descendants. Another evidence that the Spensers of Spensers were the poet's relations—though the circumstances of his birth show that he came of a distinct and perhaps less prosperous offshoot of the family—is furnished by what we may infer to have been his prolonged residence in the north country during his youth. Spenser speaks of London rather as one who had chanced to be born there, than as one whose youthful memory and cast of thought had been "wholly moulded by the life of the city: while the form and the topics of his earlier poems attest a long experience of rural affairs, and intimate enjoyment of rural existence. But we can merely infer that the poet's youth was thus spent; for we have no authentic trace of him between the date of his birth and the 20th of May, 1569, when he was entered a sizar of Pembroke Hall, in Cambridge University—the position which he took as a student indicating that affluence had not yet come to his immediate relatives. His college career was not so eminently distinguished that tradition has preserved his memory as among the brilliant alumni of his college; and his works, while they display a general acquaintance with the philosophies of Lucretius and Plato, do not show remarkable traces of extended or rigidly accurate scholarship. Whether or not we should connect any shortcomings in the mere routine of his studies with the evidence that there was a good deal of friction between Spenser and the authorities of his own college, it is tolerably plain that the poet quitted his Alma Mater with something like the same grudge which Swift bore against Dublin University. But although, in correspondence with his intimates, Spenser seems to have freely expressed himself regarding his old controller, or tutor, Dr. Perne, and to have relished the sarcasms of his friends on the same theme, no trace of such small animosities appears in his poems. True it is that he makes no grateful or celebrative mention of Pembroke Hall; but in The Faerie Queen (canto xi., book iv., page 466), when enumerating the Ouse among the rivers that attend the wedding of the Thames and the Medway, he says that the stream—

"Doth by Huntingdon and Cambridge flit;

My mother Cambridge, whom as with a crown

He doth adorn, and is adorn'd of it

With many a gentle Muse and many a learned wit."

Whatever may have been the cause of his disagreement with the Dons—whether his own remissness, his independence, or their exacting and unfair behaviour—Spenser passed honourably through the academic grades. On January 16th, 1572-3, he took the degree of Bachelor of Arts; on June 26th, 1576, that of Master of Arts; and he quitted Cambridge immediately, to go to the north country—whither, if, as we suppose, he was merely returning to the scenes of his boyhood, the memory of Rosalind may have powerfully attracted him.

Between 1576 and 1578, we know little more of Spenser's life than what can be gathered by inference from The Shepherd's Calendar. We learn there, that he resided for a season in the North; that his University friend, Gabriel Harvey, subsequently a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge (who is the Hobbinol of the Calendar and of Colin Clout), besought him to quit the bleak and shelterless hills, and come down to the warmer and softer South; and that Spenser lingered for a while in the North, through his passion for Rosalind—hoping against hope, perchance, that after all the fickle fair would relent, and prefer his suit to that of the favoured Menalcas. Many and ingenious have been the endeavours made to raise the veil that hides the identity of Spenser's early love. Edmund Kirke, another Cambridge friend of the poet's—who, under his initials E. K., introduced and annotated The Shepherd's Calendar—set wits hopefully to work by his remark that perhaps the feigned name of Rosalind, being well ordered, will bewray the very name of his love and mistress, whom by that name he coloureth. Though the parallel cases of such pedantic counterfeiting which E. K. enumerates do not exactly point to an anagrammatic solution, that is the favourite mode in which biographers of Spenser have sought to well order the name of Rosalind. Hence we have her made a lady of Kent, Rose Lynde; again a lady of Kent, Eliza Horden, the aspirate being omitted: but unfortunately those conjectures are based merely on documentary evidence that in the time of Henry VI. there lived gentlemen of Kent named Horden and Linde. Better authenticated and more consistent with probability is the theory that Rosalinde was Rose Daniel, sister of Samuel Daniel the poet, a contemporary and friend of Spenser: and the theory, so plausible from the anagrammatic point of view which E. K. seems to favour, is buttressed by the fact that Rose Daniel actually married a man who might be most significantly described as Menalcas—the poet's fictitious name for the triumphant swain. Her husband, John Florio, a poet and litterateur of some pretensions, was of eccentric and bombastic humour; he would fairly have stood for the double picture of the carl and fool that, in the seventh canto of the sixth book of The Faerie Queen, lead along the once proud but now humiliated Mirabella—who there represents Spenser's first love; and he was in the constant habit of signing himself Resolute John Florio—Menalcas, compounded from two Greek words, signifying resolute. It is sufficient to state in outline these various theories; and to remark, that however well they may harmonise within themselves, or with other passages in Spenser's poetry, they do not agree with the obvious fact that The Widow's Daughter of the Glen was a northern lady—probably a near neighbour of the Spensers of Spensers. Of Rosalind's person and character extremely little is known. It would be idle to doubt her beauty; the scanty descriptions which are on record represent her as accomplished and witty—familiar with Petrarch in his own tongue, and not afraid to bandy classical jests with the young scholar and poet; while the supposition that she was merely some peasant's daughter is discountenanced by the facts which have just been stated, and also by the consideration that not only was the attribution of lowly estate a façon de parler in pastoral poetry not peculiar to Spenser, but the poet was obviously proud of his own high connections, and may have taken a more moderate view of good birth than his own actual worldly circumstances seem to have warranted.

In 1578—solicited by his friend Harvey to come to the South, and also, as E. K. hints, desirous to obtain, by solicitation at Court, some preferment or office that might help his slender resources—Spenser quitted Lancashire for London. There can be no doubt that he did not come up quite weaponless to the battle of fortune in the capital. Long before, he had made some slight poetical essays. John Van der Noodt, a Dutch Protestant who had taken refuge in England for hatred of Popery not less than love of life, published in 1569—the year in which Spenser entered at Pembroke Hall—a volume entitled A Theatre wherein be represented as well the Miseries and Calamities that follow the Voluptuous Worldlings, as also the great Joys and Pleasures which the Faithful do enjoy. Prefixed to this volume were twenty-one Epigrams and Sonnets, by an anonymous hand; and these pieces are, either in substance or in form, identical with a number of the Sonnets, illustrating the vanity of human things that were published with Spenser's name more than a score of years afterwards, under the titles of Visions of the World's Vanity, The Visions of Petrarch, and The Visions of Bellay. It is probable also, that Prosopopoia—perhaps Spenser's most spirited poem, certainly that in which he best caught the spirit of his great model, Chaucer—was written, at least in part, during his residence at Cambridge. But it is beyond question that he brought The Shepherd's Calendar to London with him, ready or nearly ready for the press; and at the end of 1579 it was published, in small quarto, with an inscription To the noble and virtuous gentleman, most worthy of all titles, both of learning and chivalry, Master Philip Sidney. To him that is the President of Nobless and of Chivalry—as Spenser, writing under the pseudonym of Immerito, styles Sidney in the lines prefixed to the Calendar—the author had been introduced by Gabriel Harvey. A close friendship appears to have sprung up between the two young poets—as was, in truth, a most natural consequence of their introduction; Sidney made the newcomer acquainted with his uncle, the famous Earl of Leicester; and for two years Spenser moved amid the witty and splendid courtier-throng that surrounded the throne of the Maiden Queen. The friend of Sidney and the protégé of Leicester, whatever his private fortunes, might well lay claim to kinship with the proud Spencers of Althorpe; and it is probable that the poet made the most of every such opportunity to advance his interests and better his revenues. Meantime, while he paid unadulating court to the great, he did not neglect the Muses. The impression made upon his imaginative and generous mind by the brilliancy, the elegance, the high spirit, and chivalrous daring, which marked the principal figures at the Court of Elizabeth, impelled him to a loftier effort than the pathetic love-plaints of the Calendar, or the homely satire of Mother Hubberd. The aspirations after a nobler theme and a bolder song may be traced in the later portions of the Calendar—especially in the October Eclogue; and during Spenser's two years in town, the scheme of The Faerie Queen was doubtless drawn up, and part of the poem composed. It does not say much for the penetration of Gabriel Harvey, or the influence which his veneration for the antique might have exerted if Spenser had been a poet of weaker will, to find that The Faerie Queen positively horrified him. Nine comedies, whereunto, in imitation of Herodotus, Spenser had given the names of the nine Muses, pleased the intellectually superstitious pedant better than the Elvish Queen—in which, with characteristic faith in his own powers and merits, Spenser had expressed a purpose to emulate and a hope to surpass Ariosto in his Orlando Furioso. If so be, says Harvey, writing in April 1580; if so be the Faery Queen be fairer in your eye than the Nine Muses, and Hobgoblin run away with the garland from Apollo; mark what I say—and yet I will not say that [what] I thought; but there is an end for this once, and fare you well, till God or some good angel put you in a better mind. Providence did not interfere with the impulse of the poet; the nine Comedies christened after the Muses are now preserved from oblivion only in the futile praise of Harvey; and the scholar's attempts to induce Spenser to adopt a metrical system founded on that of the ancients, met with no more attention than a half-amused and half-courteous experimentation, in letters between the two friends, which reminds us of similar exercises not long ago put forth by Mr. Tennyson. Besides the nine comedies, other poems are mentioned in correspondence about this time, of which no memorial remains, at least in their original form. Such are Dreams, Legends, the Court of Cupid, The English Poet, The Dying Pelican, Stemmata Dudleiana, Slumber, and Epithalamium Thamesis. Stemmata Dudleiana probably survives in The Ruins of Time; Slumber and Dreams in the Visions formerly mentioned; the Court of Cupid and Epithalamium Thamesis in The Faerie Queen (cantos x. and xi. of book iv.) The English Poet and The Dying Pelican are lost.

In August 1580 Spenser—who seems to have for some time acted as secretary to the Earl of Leicester—attended Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton, who had been appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland, in the capacity of private secretary. Raleigh, who had not long returned from his voyage to Newfoundland with Sir Humphrey Gilbert, his half-brother, was serving in the English forces; and in all probability the friendship now began which was destined to bear fruit in the poet's introduction to Queen Elizabeth. Of this, however, we have no evidence: what we do know is, that in March 1581 Spenser was appointed to the office of Clerk of Degrees and Recognizances in the Irish Court of Chancery—an office which he held until, in 1588, he was made Clerk to the Council of Munster. Before the end of 1581, also, he received a Crown grant of a lease of the manor, castle, and abbey of Enniscorthy, in Wexford, at a rent of £300, on the condition of his keeping the buildings in repair. Though Enniscorthy was a pleasant and lovely place, Spenser did not hold it long; in December 1581, he sold his interest to one Richard Synot, from whom it passed into the hands of Sir H. Wallop, the ancestor of the present Portsmouth family We have sufficient proof of the high esteem in which the poet held the chivalrous and high-minded but somewhat absolute Deputy whom he served, in the character of Grey drawn under the name of Sir Artegall in the fifth book of The Faerie Queen; and in the recommendatory Sonnet prefixed to that Poem, where Spenser addresses Grey as the pillar of his life and patron of his Muse's pupilage. When Grey was recalled, in 1582, Spenser is generally stated to have returned with him; but there are reasons for believing that the poet remained at his post in Dublin, and devoted his labour to The Faerie Queen. He distinctly describes that poem, in his introductory Sonnet addressed to the Earl of Ormond (page 22), as the wild fruit which salvage soil hath bred, and in the Sonnet to Grey as rude rhymes, the which a rustic Muse did weave in salvage soil, far from Parnassus Mount. Moreover, the duties of his Chancery office required him to reside in Ireland; there are no well-authenticated notices of his presence in England between 1582 and 1590—a thing incomprehensible if he had been within easy reach of Harvey's letters, Sidney's friendship, or Leicester's good offices; there is evidence, in a work by his friend Lodowick Briskett, that Spenser lived at or near Dublin, in high repute for literary judgment, for scholarship, and genius, during those years in which direct authentic record loses sight of him; while his intimate knowledge of the condition of Ireland, displayed in his sole prose work, testifies to far more than that cursory observation which the leisure of two years' official life could afford. Another token that his Chancery duties detained him in Dublin, is furnished by a Sonnet addressed to Gabriel Harvey, dated at that city on the 18th of July 1586; while it is not easy to understand why, on the 27th of June in the same year, the Queen should have made him a grant of 3028 acres of land in the county of Cork, unless it was in reward of services in Ireland. We may therefore conceive Spenser going through the daily routine of Chancery work at Dublin—as Chaucer performed the dull duties of his post as Controller of Customs at London—until, in 1586, he was banished from such society as the Irish chief city afforded, to the lovely but lonely vicinity of Kilcolman.

The estate consisted of lands forfeit by the Earl of Desmond. The ancient castle that stood upon it—now a mere mound of ruins—had been a residence of the old Earls. It was romantically situated, two miles from Doneraile, on the northern side of a lake fed by the waters of the Awbeg, which the poet fancifully named the Mulla; and all around rose mountain ranges, at a distance sufficient to permit the boast, that from the battlements half the breadth of Ireland could be seen. The extensive plain in which Spenser's mansion stood is bounded on the north by what the poet styled the Mountains of Mole,—the Ballyhoura Hills, or, more properly, the range of Galty More, in which sprang the Mulla, the Bregog, the Molanna (or Brackbawn), and the Funcheon, all named in his Faerie Queen or Colin Clout: the eastern horizon was shut in by the distant mountains of Waterford; the western by the mountains of Kerry; the southern by the mountains of Nagle—all covered, in those days, with dense natural timber, for which the pilgrim to Spenser's ruined shrine now looks around in vain. It is supposed that the grant of this picturesque domain was procured for the poet through the good offices of Sidney—whose enforced retirement from the gay and brave Court, beyond the atmosphere of which men of Raleigh's stamp could scarcely breathe, had been solaced by those imaginations of pastoral simplicity and happiness, far from the whirling city and the intriguing palace, which the young warrior-poet indulged in his romance of Arcadia. Perhaps Spenser coveted the retirement of Kilcolman; the place, if it came to him through the influence of Sidney, must have been rendered peculiarly dear when the hero's death in Holland, towards the close of 1586, made it seem, as it were, the last bequest of his friendship and admiration. The condition of the grant is said to have made residence on the estate obligatory; but it may be questioned whether Spenser hastened to take possession—for it was not until 1588 that, quitting his Chancery post at Dublin, he became Clerk to the Council of Munster; and it may be supposed, that, if he had taken earlier possession of his castle, he must have resigned his Chancery appointment sooner. We know, however, that in the latter half of 1589 Sir Walter Raleigh, driven from Court to his Irish estates and duties by the prevalence of the Essex influence, found Spenser at Kilcolman, with three books of his Faerie Queen ready for the press. Spenser himself, in Colin Clout's Come Home Again, describes the arrival of the Shepherd of the Ocean—so he terms Raleigh—and his voyage to England at the request and in the company of his illustrious visitor. It is easy to fancy the pleasures which these two high-souled and accomplished men—alike instinct with the tender magnanimity, the chivalrous ardour, of the period—found in each other's society; and the hope of favour and fame with which Spenser set out anew for Court—invited by the foremost soldier and most brilliant courtier of the time, and bearing with him a work of which the author measured the worth and the renown not less liberally than any of this generation.

Raleigh was as good as his word to Spenser; he introduced the poet to the Queen, who was to find in him her most brilliant and enduring eulogist; and—rather tardily, it must be admitted—in the year after the poem was printed, her Majesty bestowed on Spenser a pension of £50 per annum. On the 1st of December 1589, The Faerie Queen first made her mark on the books of the Stationers' Company; early in 1590, the First, Second, and Third Books were published, in a small quarto, by Ponsonby. They were dedicated To the most (high) mighty, and magnificent Empress (renowned for piety, virtue, and all gracious Government), Elizabeth, by the grace of God, Queen of England, France, and Ireland (and of Virginia), Defender of the Faith, &c., her most humble servant, Edmund Spenser (doth, in all humility, dedicate, present, and consecrate these his labours, to live with the eternity of her fame). The dedication of 1590—amplified, when the three books were reprinted six years afterwards, by the words here placed within brackets—was accompanied by a letter to Raleigh, serving as introduction and preliminary explanation to the whole poem; and, besides some commendatory sonnets by friends, there were also seventeen sonnets addressed by the author to as many illustrious persons of the Court, &c. Great was the marvel and delight of all who read the new poet; his performance had so far transcended even the promise of The Shepherd's Calendar, that The Faerie Queen was hailed as a new revelation—as if, says one, another moon, as quiet and as lustrous as Cynthia, had come up the sky. Neither space nor the scope of this brief notice permits anything like a critical consideration of Spenser's great allegorical poem. It has many faults, of unreality, of redundancy, confusion, and inequality; but its faults, where they do not actually create, are nobly redeemed by its beauties. In the main, the allegory, never very rigidly maintained as a whole, is easy to be penetrated; the House of Holiness in the first book, for example, and the House of Alma in the second, are as charming and simple as the Interpreter's House in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, or the City of Mansoul in his Holy War; while, even where the reader may be at any loss to discover the poet's meaning, or where the poet means nothing in particular save to carry forward the story that lies on the surface, the flow, the roll, the melody of the verse reconcile him to everything. Reading The Faerie Queen, indeed, is like drifting at the will of that ocean to a voyage on which the author repeatedly compares the course of his work. We are at the mercy of a magnificent caprice. Now all is sunlit calm, like the life of Calidore among the shepherds, or of the Squire in the favour of Belphœbe. Now night falls, and the waters leap, and clash, and moan in sorrow, with Una's woe for her captive knight, or Timias' lamentation over Belphœbe's sudden wrath, or Britomart's anguish for her degraded if not faithless Artegall. Now the waves move in cadence' under the returning sun, and the golden clouds attend their march in silent but gorgeous procession, as when we follow the Masque of Cupid, or trace the steps of Scudamour in the Temple of Love, or watch the trooping river-gods that come to the wedding of Thames and Medway, or the stately advance of the Seasons and the Months to the audience of Nature upon Arlo Hill. We have tempests and glassy tranquillity, gloom and glancing brightness, the majesty, the cruelty, the gentleness of the sea, all by turns, gliding from one to the opposite phase with the natural ease and swiftness of relentless purpose and resistless might; while over all, and through all, we recognise that we are in the grasp of a superhuman spirit, to which the whole material world, and all the elements of man's nature, are but playthings at the will of its fancy. Power, Nobility, and Beauty, inseparably wedded like the Graces—such is The Faerie Queen, imperfect as it is: for is not every part of a matchless statue instinct with the loveliness and majesty of the whole?

Such was the fame which the publication of his magnum opus won for Spenser, that his printer made haste to collect what works of the poet were accessible in the hands of his friends, or otherwise loosely scattered abroad; and in 1591, when Spenser, having been endowed with his pension, was back at Kilcolman, Ponsonby put forth a volume of Complaints; containing sundry small Poems of the World's Vanity. These were, in their order, The Ruins of Time, The Tears of the Muses, Virgil's Gnat, Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberd's Tale, The Ruins of Rome, by Bellay, Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterfly (which seems to have appeared under some shape in 1590); Visions of the World's Vanity; Bellay's Visions and Petrarch's Visions. In his notice to the gentle reader, the printer gives the titles of a number of other poems, on which he could not lay his hands, and which are now lost to us for ever—for Spenser either was content with the renown gained by The Faerie Queen, or was prevented by his premature death from rendering justice to the labours of his youth. The Ruins of Time, an elegy on the recent deaths of Sidney (1586), Leicester (1588), and Leicester's brother, the Earl of Warwick (1589), was written during the poet's stay in England; and so was his Daphnaïda, an elegy on the death of the daughter of Henry Lord Howard Viscount Byndon, and wife of Arthur Gorges, Esq. Immediately after his return to Kilcolman, Spenser recounted the visit of Raleigh, and his voyage to England, in Colin Clout 's Come Home Again; a poem which he kept by him for some years, and published in 1595, to refute—as the dedication to Raleigh shows—a reproach of his friend that he was idle. In this, as in Spenser's greater pastoral, Rosalind holds a conspicuous place; but merely as a fondly-remembered and still reverenced idol of the past—not, as twelve years before, an object of fruitless desire embittering the poet's whole life. But Rosalind was soon to be dismissed from the place she yet held in Spenser's heart. About the end of 1592, it would seem, he fell in love with a fair Irishwoman, of whom we know little more than the fact that she had golden hair; bore—like Spenser's mother, and his Sovereign—the name of Elizabeth; and was, by birth and personal qualities, fully worthy to occupy the throne where Rosalind had reigned so long. The woman whom Spenser wooed as his Sonnets show, and, when he had won her, celebrated in his magnificent Epithalamion," must surely have been of no ordinary attractions and character; but, save the particulars already stated, and the record that the poet married her on St Barnabas' Day, June the 11th, 1594, we know nothing about one whom her husband has rendered immortal in her obscurity.

Before his marriage, Spenser had completed the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Books of The Faerie Queen; but they were not at once given to the press. In 1595, the Sonnets and Epithalamion were published; and towards the end of that year Spenser came to England, bearing the second portion of his great poem, which was issued from Ponsonby's press in 1596, along with a reprint of the first three books. The publication raised Spenser, if possible, still higher in the regard of his contemporaries than before. But he was not destined long to enjoy his fame, which was all the greater for the rare rivalry of genius that distinguished the closing years of the sixteenth century. He found his friend Essex the reigning favourite; and although Burleigh was yet powerful in the Queen's councils, and, never having been friendly, could not be expected to further the poet's desire for preferment while he remained an intimate and protégé of Essex—still Spenser laid the foundation of what might have been a prosperous career, but for the blow of unforeseen misfortune. Dating from Greenwich, 1st September, 1596, Spenser dedicated to the Countess of Cumberland and the Countess of Warwick his four Hymns—in honour of Love, of Beauty, of Heavenly Love, and of Heavenly Beauty; and later in the year he published the Prothalamion. Next year, he returned to Ireland; and we have no knowledge of his life there, until it was overtaken by fatal calamity. Lord Grey's stern suppression of the revolt of 1580 had but confined the flames of disaffection, which broke forth in 1598 with proportionately increased violence. Spenser was among the first marks for the vengeance of the wild Irishry. From whatever cause—it is said, through over-keen attention to his worldly interests—the poet was not popular in his own region. His View of the Present State of Ireland, recommending drastic remedies for the disorders and discontent of the country, had not been published; but it had circulated freely in manuscript, and the sentiments of its author were well known. He held the seat of the banned and impoverished Desmonds, To crown all, the great obstacle to Court advancement having been removed by Burleigh's death, Spenser had just been nominated Sheriff of Cork. It was not surprising that, at the signal of rebellion, the owner of Kilcolman, the authoritative embodiment of armed aggression, should be the first to experience the wrath of the down-trodden race. The furious Munster hillsmen swooped on the doomed household. Spenser, his wife, and all his children but one, narrowly escaped with life—one child, an infant, was left behind in the haste and confusion, and perished amid the ruins of the sacked and burning mansion. It is not probable that this catastrophe lost to the world much of The Faerie Queen; considering the time over which the production of the first six books had extended, and the recent long absence of the poet in England, much progress could not have been made with the contemplated second six—far less could they have been lost in the fire or the flight. But none the less did they perish on that cruel October day of 1598. The poet never wrote more. Arriving in London, destitute and sorrow-stricken, his heart broken by the common ruin of his home and his hopes, he died, apparently of sheer grief, in a tavern in Eng Street, Westminster, on the 16th of January 1599.

There is no ground for supposing that he died in actual distress; he had many friends, he had great patrons, he still held a small but sufficient pension. But the end was sad enough, for all that. He died at the very height of his fame and his powers; he had barely completed his forty-sixth year; and the bitterness of that despairing death-bed must have been intensified by the poet's own consciousness of all that was passing away with him into the voiceless realm. His friend Essex buried him honourably in the great Abbey, near the resting-place of Chaucer; poets attended his hearse, bearing elegies and mournful poems, and threw into the too early tomb the pens that wrote them. A little man, who wore short hair; his contemporaries tell us no more of his personal presence: posterity has it that he was among the giants of the olden time, and that around his head will play for ever the glory of intellectual power, tempered by the chaste light of spiritual purity.

NOTE ON THE FAERIE QUEEN.

In abridging The Faerie Queen for the present volume, the endeavour has been to retain every stanza that either possessed some peculiar beauty, or was essential for the carrying on of the story. But it has been above all sought to present the finer passages of the poem; and in seeking that end stanzas and lines may have been omitted whose absence some readers will regret. The Editor would fain believe that such will rarely be found the case; for, as in the prose outline representing the omitted passages every line of especial beauty or force has been embodied, so isolated stanzas, containing brilliant images, have almost invariably been preserved. To show to what extent the abridgment represents the original, the following table has been prepared, showing the entire number of stanzas in each canto, and the number of those stanzas which are retained in this volume:

img1.png

Thus it appears, that, out of the 3848 stanzas of which the Faerie Queen consists, 2238, or nearly two-thirds, are retained; the remaining 1610 being condensed into a prose outline occupying one-fourth of their space, and thus making the bulk of the poem, as here given, about one-third less than that of the full text. The First Book, containing the Legend of the Red Cross Knight, or of Holiness, has been presented without curtailment, both because it is the best known and perhaps the best sustained of the six, and- because it seemed desirable to give an idea of the manner in which Spenser worked out his conceptions. The marks employed in the text are the same as those used in Chaucer; the note of diæresis, to show where a usually silent e should be sounded, or to indicate where the termination ed of the past tense should have the value of a distinct syllable; and the acute accent, to show where the termination tion is dissyllabic, or where the accent differs from the modern usage. When several verses are quoted together in the prose outline, a wider space has been employed to mark the commencement of a new line.

THE FAERIE QUEEN

DISPOSED INTO TWELVE BOOKS, FASHIONING TWELVE MORAL VIRTUES.

————

A LETTER OF THE AUTHOR'S

EXPOUNDING HIS WHOLE INTENTION IN THE COURSE OF THIS WORK; WHICH, FOR THAT IT GIVETH GREAT LIGHT TO THE READER, FOR THE BETTER UNDERSTANDING IS HEREUNTO ANNEXED.

————

TO THE EIGHT NOBLE AND VALOROUS

SIR WALTER RALEIGH, KNIGHT,

LORD WARDEN OP THE STANNARIES, AND HER MAJESTY'S LIEUTENANT OF THE COUNTY OF CORNWALL.

Sir,—Knowing how doubtfully all allegories may be construed, and this book of mine, which I have entitled The Faerie Queen, being a continued Allegory, or dark Conceit, I have thought good, as well for avoiding of jealous opinions and misconstructions, as also for your better light in reading thereof (being so by you commanded), to discover unto you the general intention and meaning, which in the whole course thereof I have fashioned, without expressing of any particular purposes, or by-accidents,{1} therein occasioned. The general end, therefore, of all the book, is to fashion a. gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline: which for that I conceived should be most plausible and pleasing, being coloured with an historical fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter than for profit of the ensample, I chose the History of King Arthur, as most fit for the excellency of his person, being made famous by many men's former works, and also farthest from the danger of envy and suspicion of present time. In which I have followed all the antique poets historical: first Homer, who in the persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a good governor and a virtuous man, the one in his Iliad, the other in his Odyssey; then Virgil, whose like intention was to do in the person of Æneas; after him Ariosto comprised them both in his Orlando; and lately Tasso dissevered them again, and formed both parts in two persons, namely that part which they in philosophy call Ethicé, or virtues of a private man, coloured in his Rinaldo; the other, named Politicé, in his Godfredo. By ensample of which excellent poets, I labour to portray in Arthur, before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private Moral Virtues, as Aristotle hath devised;{2} the which is the purpose of these first twelve books: which if I find to be well accepted, I may be perhaps encouraged to frame the other part of Political Virtues in his person, after that he came to be king. To some I know this method will seem displeasant, which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large, as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devices. But such, me seems, should be satisfied with the use of these days, seeing all things accounted by their shows, and nothing esteemed of, that is not delightful and pleasing to common sense. For this cause is Xenophon preferred before Plato, for that the one, in the exquisite depth of his judgment, formed a commonwealth, such as it should be; but the other, in the person of Cyrus, and the Persians, fashioned a government, such as might best be; so much more profitable and gracious is doctrine by ensample, than by rule. So have I laboured to do in the person of Arthur: whom I conceive, after his long education by Timon, to whom he was by Merlin delivered to be brought up, so soon as he was born of the Lady Igrayne, to have seen in a dream or vision the Faerie Queen, with whose excellent beauty ravished, he awaking resolved to seek her out; and so being by Merlin armed, and by Timon thoroughly instructed, he went to seek her forth in Faerie Land. In that Faerie Queen I mean Glory in my general intention, but in my particular I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our Sovereign the Queen, and her kingdom in Faerie Land. And yet, in some places else, I do otherwise shadow her. For considering she beareth two persons, the one of a most royal Queen or Empress, the other of a most virtuous and beautiful lady, this latter part in some places I do express in Belphœbe, fashioning her name according to your own excellent conceit of Cynthia: Phœbe and Cynthia being both names of Diana. So in the person of Prince Arthur I set forth Magnificence in particular; which Virtue, for that (according to Aristotle and the rest) it is the perfection of all the rest, and containeth in it them all, therefore in the whole I mention the deeds of Arthur applyable to that Virtue, which I write of in that book. But of the twelve other Virtues, I make twelve other knights the patterns, for the more variety of the history: of which these three books contain three.{3} The. first, of the Knight of the Redcross, in whom I express Holiness; The second, of Sir Guyon, in whom I set forth Temperance: The third, of Britomartis, a lady knight, in whom I picture Chastity. But, because the beginning of the whole work seemeth abrupt and as depending upon other antecedents, it needs that ye know the occasion of these three knights' several adventures; for the method of a poet historical is not such, as of an historiographer. For an historiographer discourseth of affairs orderly as they were done, accounting as well the times as the actions; but a poet thrusteth into the midst, even where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing{4} to the things forepast, and divining of things to come, maketh a pleasing analysis of all. The beginning therefore of my history, if it were to be told by an historiographer, should be the twelfth book, which is the last; where I devise that the Faerie Queen kept her annual feast twelve days; upon which twelve several days, the occasions of the twelve several adventures happened, which, being undertaken by twelve several knights, are in these twelve books severally handled and discoursed. The first was this. In the beginning of the feast, there presented himself a tall clownish young man, who, falling before the Queen of Faeries, desired a boon (as the manner then was) which during that feast she might not refuse; which was that he might have the achievement of any adventure, which during that feast should happen. That being granted, he rested him on the floor, as unfit, through his rusticity, for a better place. Soon after entered a fair lady in mourning weeds, riding on a white ass, with a dwarf behind her leading a warlike steed, that bore the arms of a knight, and his spear in the dwarf's hand. She, falling before the Queen of Faeries, complained that her father and mother, an ancient king and queen, had been by an huge dragon many years shut up in a brazen castle, who thence suffered them not to issue: and therefore besought the Faerie Queen to assign her some one of her knights, to take on him that exploit. Presently that clownish person upstarting, desired that adventure: whereat the Queen much wondering, and the lady much gainsaying, yet he earnestly importuned his desire. In the end the lady told him, that unless that armour, which she brought, would serve him (that is, the armour of a Christian man, specified by St Paul, vi. Ephes.) he could not succeed in that enterprise; which being forthwith put upon him with due furnitures thereunto, he seemed the goodliest man in all that company, and was well liked of the lady. And eftsoons{5} taking on him knighthood, and mounting on that strange courser, he went forth with her on that adventure; where beginneth the first book, viz.

A gentle Knight was pricking on the plain, &c.{6}

The second day there came in a palmer, bearing an infant with bloody hands, whose parents he complained to have been slain by an enchantress called Acrasia: and therefore craved of the Faery Queen, to appoint him some knight, to perform that adventure; which being assigned to Sir Guyon, he presently went forth with that same palmer: which is the beginning of the second book and the whole subject thereof. The third day there came in a groom, who complained before the Faery Queen, that a vile enchanter, called Busirane, had in hand a most fair lady, called Amoretta, whom he kept in most grievous torment, because she would not yield him the pleasure of her body. Whereupon Sir Scudamour, the lover of that lady, presently took on him that adventure. But being unable to perform it by reason of the hard enchantments, after long sorrow, in the end he met with Britomartis, who succoured him, and rescued his love. But, by occasion hereof, many other adventures are intermedled,{7} but rather as accidents, than intendments:{8} As the love of Britomart, the overthrow of Marinell, the misery of Florimell, the virtuousness of Belphœbe, the lasciviousness of Hellenora, and many the like. This much, Sir, I have briefly overrun to direct your understanding to the well-head of the history, that, from thence gathering the whole intention of the conceit, ye may as in a handful gripe{9} all the discourse, which otherwise may haply seem tedious and confused. So, humbly craving the continuance of your honourable favour toward me, and the eternal establishment of your happiness, I humbly take leave.

Yours most humbly affectionate,

Ed. Spenser.

Jan. 23, 1589.

VERSES ADDRESSED BY THE AUTHOR OF THE FAERIE QUEEN TO SEVERAL NOBLEMEN, ETC.

To the Right Honourable Sir Christopher Hatton,{10}

Lord High Chancellor of England, &c.

Those prudent heads, that with their counsels wise

Whilóm{11} the pillars of th' earth did sustain,

And taught ambitious Rome to tyrannise

And on the neck of all the world to reign,

Oft from those grave affairs were wont abstain,

With the sweet lady Muses for to play:

So Ennius the elder Africain,{12}

So Maro{13} oft did Cæsar's cares allay.

So you, great Lord, that with your counsel sway

The burden of this kingdom mightily,

With like delights sometimes may eke delay{14}

The rugged brow of careful Policy;

And to these idle rhymes lend little space,

Which for their title's sake may find more grace.

E. S.

To the Right Honourable the Lord Burleigh,{15}

Lord High Treasurer of England.

To you, right noble Lord, whose careful breast

To menage{16} of most grave affairs is bent,

And on whose mighty shoulders most doth rest

The burden of this kingdom's government

(As the wide compass of the firmament

On Atlas' mighty shoulders is upstay'd),

Unfitly I these idle rhymes present,

The labour of lost time, and wit unstay'd:

Yet if their deeper sense be inly weigh'd,

And the dim veil, with which from common view

Their fairer parts are hid, aside be laid,

Perhaps not vain they may appear to you.

Such as they be, vouchsafe them to receive,

And wipe their faults out of your censure

grave.

E. S.

To the Right Honourable the Earl of Oxford,{17}

Lord High Chamberlain of England, &c.

Receive, most noble Lord, in gentle gree,{18}

The unripe fruit of an unready wit;

Which, by thy countenance, doth crave to be

Defended from foul envy's pois'nous bit.{19}

Which so to do may thee right well befit,

Since th' antique glory of thine ancestry

Under a shady veil is therein writ,

And eke thine own long-living memory,

Succeeding them in true nobility:

And also for the love which thou dost bear

To th' Heliconian imps,{20} and they to thee;

They unto thee, and thou to them, most dear:

Dear as thou art unto thyself, so love,—

That loves and honours thee, as doth behove,—

E. S.

To the Right Honourable the Earl of Northumberland.{21}

The sacred Muses have made always claim

To be the nurses of nobility,

And registers of everlasting fame

To all that arms profess and chivalry.

Then, by like right, the noble progeny,

Which them succeed in fame and worth, are tied

T' embrace the service of sweet Poetry,

By whose endeavours they are glorified;

And eke from all, of whom it is envied,{22}

To patronize the author of their praise,

Which gives them life that else would soon have died,

And crowns their ashes with immortal bays.

To thee therefore, right noble Lord, I send

This present of my pains, it to defend.

E. S.

To the Bight Honourable the Earl of Cumberland.{23}

Redoubted Lord, in whose courageous mind

The flower of chivalry, now bloss'ming fair,

Doth promise fruit worthy the noble kind{24}

Which of their praises have you left the heir;

To you this humble present I prepare,

For love of virtue and of martial praise;

To which though nobly ye inclined are

(As goodly well ye show'd in late assays),{25}

Yet brave ensample of long passëd days,

In which true honour ye may fashion'd see,

To like desire of honour may ye raise,

And fill your mind with magnanimity.

Receive it, Lord, therefore, as it was meant,

For honour of your name and high descent.

E. S.

To the most Honourable and excellent Lord the Earl of Essex,{26}

Great Master of the Horse to her Highness,

and Knight of the Noble Order of the Garter, &c.

Magnific Lord, whose virtues excellent

Do merit a most famous poet's wit

To be thy living praise's instrument;

Yet do not sdeign{27} to let thy name be writ

In this base poem, for thee far unfit;

Naught is thy worth disparagëd thereby.

But when my Muse,—whose feathers, nothing flit,{28}

Do yet but flag and lowly learn to fly,—

With bolder wing shall dare aloft to sty{29}

To the last praises of this Faery Queen;

Then shall it make most famous memory

Of thine heroic parts, such as they been:{30}

Till then, vouchsafe thy noble countenance

To their first labour's needed furtherance.

E. S.

To the Right Honourable the Earl of Ormond and Ossory.{31}

Receive, most noble Lord, a simple taste

Of the wild fruit which salvage{32} soil hath bred;

Which, being through long wars left almost waste,

With brutish barbarism is overspread:

And, in so fair a land as may be read,{33}

Not one Parnassus, nor one Helicon

Left for sweet Muses to be harbourëd,

But where thyself hast thy brave mansión:

There indeed dwell fair Graces many one,

And gentle Nymphs, delights of learned wits;

And in thy person, without paragon,{34}

All goodly bounty and true honour sits.

Such therefore, as that wasted soil doth yield,

Receive, dear Lord, in worth,{35} the fruit of barren field.

E. S.

To the Right Honourable the Lord Charles Howard,

Lord high Admiral of England,{36}

Knight of the Noble Order of the Garter,

and one of her Majesty's Privy Council, &c.

And ye, brave Lord,—whose goodly personage

And noble deeds, each other garnishing,

Make you example, to the present age,

Of the old heroes, whose famous offspring

The antique poets wont so much to sing,—

In this same pageant have a worthy place,

Since those huge castles of Castilian King,

That vainly threaten'd kingdoms to displace,

Like flying doves ye did before you chase;

And that proud people, waxen{37} insolent

Through many victories, didst first deface:

Thy praise's everlasting monument

Is in this verse engraven semblably,{38}

That it may live to all posterity.

E. S.

To the Right Honourable the Lord of Hunsdon,{39} High Chamberlain to her Majesty.

Renownëd Lord, that, for your worthiness

And noble deeds, have your deservëd place

High in the favour of that Emperess,

The world's sole glory and her sex's grace;

Here eke of right have you a worthy place,

Both for your nearness to that Faery Queen,

And for your own high merit in like case:

Of which apparent proof was to be seen

When that tumultuous rage and fearful deen{40}

Of Northern rebels ye did pacify,{41}

And their disloyal power defacëd clean,

The record of enduring memory.

Live, Lord, for ever in this lasting verse,

That all posterity thy honour may rehearse.

E. S.

To the most renowned and valiant Lord,

the Lord Grey of Wilton, Knight of the Noble.

Order of the Garter, &c.

Most noble Lord, the pillar of my life,

And patron of my Muse's pupilage;

Through whose large bounty, pourëd on merife

In the first season of my feeble age,

I now do live bound yours by vassalage

(Since nothing ever may redeem, nor reave{42}

Out of your endless debt, so sure a gage{43});

Vouchsafe in worth this small gift to receive,

Which in your noble hands for pledge I leave

Of all the rest that I am tied t' account:{44}

Rude rhymes, the which a rustic Muse did weave

In salvage soil, far from Parnassus Mount,

And roughly wrought in an unlearnëd loom:

The which vouchsafe, dear Lord, your favourable doom.{45}

E. S.

To the Bight Honourable the Lord of Buckhurst,{46}

one of her Majesty's Privy Council.

In vain I think, right honourable Lord,

By this rude rhyme to memorize thy name,

Whose learned Muse hath writ her own recórd

In golden verse, worthy immortal fame:

Thou much more fit (were leisure to the same)

Thy gracious Sov'reign's praises to compile,

And her imperial Majesty to frame

In lofty numbers and heroic style.

But, since thou may'st not so, give leave a while

To baser wit his power therein to spend,

Whose gross defaults thy dainty pen may file,{47}

And unadvisëd oversights amend.

But evermore vouchsafe it to maintain

Against vile Zoilus'{48} backbitings vain.

E. S.

To the Right Honourable Sir Francis Walsingham,

Knight, principal Secretary to her Majesty,

and one of her honourable Privy Council.

That Mantuan poet's{49} incomparëd{50} spirit,

Whose garland now is set in highest place,—

Had not Mæcenas, for his worthy merit,

It first advanc'd to great Augustus' grace,—

Might long perhaps have lain in silence base,

Nor been so much admir'd of later age.

This lowly Muse, that learns like steps to trace,

Flies for like aid unto your patronage

(That are the great Mæcenas of this age,

As well to all that civil arts profess,

As those that are inspir'd with, martial rage),

And craves protection of her feebleness:

Which if ye yield, perhaps ye may her raise

In bigger tunes to sound your living praise.

E. S.

To the Right Noble Lord and most valiant Captain,

Sir John Norris, Knight, Lord President of Munster.

Who ever gave more honourable prize{51}

To the sweet Muse, than did the martial crew,

That their brave deeds she might immortalize

In her shrill trump, and sound their praises due?

Who then ought more to favour her than you,

Most noble Lord, the honour of this age,

And precedent of all that arms ensue?{52}

Whose warlike prowess and manly couráge,

Temper'd with reason and advisement{53} sage,

Hath fill'd sad Belgic with victorious spoil;

In France and Ireland left a famous gage;{54}

And lately shak'n the Lusitanian soil.

Since, then, each where thou hast dispread thy fame,

Love him that hath eternizëd your name.

E. S.

To the Right Noble and Valorous Knight,

Sir Walter Raleigh,{55} Lord Warden of the Stannaries,

and Lieutenant of Cornwall.

To thee, that art the summer's nightingale,

Thy sov'reign Goddess's{56} most dear delight,

Why do I send this rustic madrigale,

That may thy tuneful ear unseason{57} quite?

Thou only fit this argument to write,

In whose high thoughts Pleasure hath built her bow'r,

And dainty Love learn'd sweetly to indite.

My rhymes I know unsavoury and sour,

To taste the streams that, like a golden show'r,

Flow from thy fruitful head of thy love's praise;

Fitter perhaps to thunder martial stowre,{58}

When so thee list thy lofty Muse to raise:

Yet, till that thou thy poem wilt make known,

Let thy fair Cynthia's{59} praises be thus rudely shown.

E. S.

To the Right Honourable and most virtuous Lady, the Countess of Pembroke.

Remembrance of that most heroic spirit,{60}—

The Heaven's pride, the glory of our days,

Which now triúmpheth (through immortal merit

Of his brave virtues) crown'd with lasting bays

Of heavenly bliss and everlasting praise;

Who first my Muse did lift out of the floor,

To sing his sweet delights in lowly lays,—

Bids me, most noble Lady, to adore

His goodly image living evermore

In the divine resemblance of your face;

Which with your virtues ye embellish more,

And native beauty deck with heav'nly grace:

For his, and for your own especial sake,

Vouchsafe from him this token in good worth to take.

E. S.

To the most virtuous and beautiful Lady, the Lady Carew.{61}

Ne{62} may I, without blot of endless blame,

You, fairest Lady, leave out of this place;

But with remembrance of your gracious name

(Wherewith that courtly garland most ye grace

And deck the world), adorn these verses base:

Not that these few lines can in them comprise

Those glorious ornaments of heav'nly grace

Wherewith ye triumph over feeble eyes,

And in subduëd hearts do tyrannise

(For thereunto doth need a golden quill,

And silver leaves, them rightly to devise{63});

But to make humble present of good will:

Which, when as timely means it purchase may,

In ampler wise itself will forth display.

E. S.

To all the gracious and beautiful Ladies in the Court.

The Chian painter, when he was requir'd

To portray Venus in her perfect hue,

To make his work more absolute,{64} desir'd

Of all the fairest maids to have the view.

Much more me needs (to draw the semblance{65} true

Of Beauty's Queen, the world's sole wonderment),

To sharp my sense with sundry beauties' view,

And steal from each some part of ornament.

If all the world to seek I over went,

A fairer crew yet nowhere could I see

Than that brave Court doth to mine eye present;

That the world's pride seems gather'd there to be.

Of each a part I stole by cunning theft:

Forgive it me, fair Dames,