open space begirt by "trees of honour" which rise higher than all trees besides, and "all winter as in summer, bud." Within that precinct dance in radiant circle a hundred nymphs, arrayed only in the light of their own unblemished and unashamed beauty. In the centre of the ring three of their number, and the most beautiful, sing as well as dance round a maiden of earth, who, as such, wears maiden attire, and who is more beautiful even than those three. While the others engird her, like Ariadne's tiar, and pelt her with flowers, she alone stands in the midst unastonished, and "crowned with a rosy girland." At last Calidore ventures to approach from the skirt of the wood, and the lovely pageant dissolves into air. There remains but the shepherd, Colin Clout (the name by which Spenser had designated himself in his early poems), who sits on the hill still holding that pipe whose music had evoked those nymphs, and to which they ever danced. The human maiden is his "Elizabeth,” that maiden hard to be won, but who at last not only loved the poet, but fostered his song, as we may infer from the lines

She to whom the shepherd pyped alone;
That made him pype so merrily, as never none.

The shepherd explains the vision. That hilltop had been preferred to her own Cytheron by Venus, in the olden time when she was still pure as the sea-foam whence she had sprung, and when between herself and Dian there was friendship, not war; and there she used to dance with the Graces. Venus loved that

spot no more; but the three Graces and the hundred lesser Graces native to that hill, still haunted it: the shepherd's pipe had still power to draw them from their ambush, and among them there was still that one maiden of earth whom they had elected as their sister, and on whom they showered their tribute.

These three on men all gracious gifts bestow
Which decke the body or adorne the mynde,
To make them lovely or well-favoured show;
As comely carriage, entertainment kynde,
Sweet semblaunt, friendly offices that bynde,
And all the complements of curtesie,

That teach us how, to each degree and kynde
We should ourselves demeane, to low, to hie,
To friends, to foes; which skill men call Civility.

Therefore they alwaies smoothly seem to smile,
That we likewise should mylde and gentle be;
And also naked are, that without guile

Or false dissemblaunce all them plaine may see,
Simple and true from covert malice free.

Such was human life, as Spenser had dreamed it, perhaps amid the groves of Penshurst, or on that walk at Wilton, a region not less classic, on which Spenser's early friend had paced with one like himself—"Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother." Such, too, is the one glimpse we have of Spenser's life with his "beautifullest. Bride," the best sung of women except Beatrice, though but an Irish "country lasse of low degree "—

Ne, lesse in vertue that beseemes her well
Doth she exceed the rest of all her race;
For which the Graces that here wont to dwell
Have for more honor brought her to this place,
And graced her so much to be another Grace.

This canto is the complement to Spenser's "Song

made in lieu of many ornaments," his far-famed Epithalamion. I have heard Wordsworth remark, more than once, that in its long and exquisitely balanced stanzas there was a swanlike movement and a subtle metrical sweetness, the secret of which he could never wholly discover; and the like of which he found nowhere else except in Milton's Lycidas.

I am aware how inadequate these remarks are to their great theme. I could not, without passing the limits within which I must restrict myself, advert here to several matters which properly belong to it, especially the large and deep philosophy expressed in, or latent under, Spenser's poetry. He was the philosophic poet of his age, as Wordsworth is of ours; and the philosophy of those two great poets, though in no sense at variance, was as different, the one from the other, as the character of their genius. Spenser's castle by the Mulla stood, and a fragment of it still stands, about thirty miles to the south of the house in which I write. That house, too, like Kilcolman, was the house of a poet-one who from his boyhood had loved Spenser well, and in whom a discerning critic had noted a sympathetic spirit-the poet of Mary Tudor. The eyes of both poets must have rested often on the same exquisitely drawn mountain range, that of the Galtees, though they saw it in a different perspective. Mountains, while they separate neighbours, create, notwithstanding a neighbourly tie between those who dwell far apart; and though the barriers of

time are more stubborn things than those of space, when I look from our eastern windows at Galtymore, I am sometimes reminded of the lines written by Wordsworth at the grave of Burns, on whose verse the later poet had fed in youth

Huge Criffel's hoary top ascends

By Skiddaw seen,

Neighbours we were, and loving friends
We might have been.

II

SPENSER AS A PHILOSOPHIC POET

IT often happens that some eminent characteristic of a great poet has almost escaped observation owing to the degree in which other characteristics, not higher but more attractive to the many, have also belonged to him. Spenser is an instance of this. If it were asked what chiefly constitutes the merit of his poetry, the answer would commonly be, its descriptive power, or its chivalrous sentiment, or its exquisite sense of beauty; yet the quality which he himself desiderated most for his chief work was one not often found in union with these, viz. sound and true philosophic thought. This characteristic is perhaps his highest. It was the one which chiefly gained for him the praise of Shakespeare-—

Spenser to me, whose deep conceit is such
As, passing all conceit, needs no defence;

and it was doubtless the merit to which he owed the influence which Milton acknowledged that Spenser's poetry had exercised over his own. There is more of