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Surrey (United Kingdom) (search for this): chapter 2
casting back the sunshine like a stream blown on by clear western winds. But Skelton was an exceptional blossom of autumn. A long and dreary winter follows. Surrey, who brought back with him from Italy the blank-verse not long before introduced by Trissino, is to some extent another exception. He had the sentiment of nature and unhackneyed feeling, but he has no mastery of verse, nor any elegance of diction. We have Gascoyne, Surrey, Wyatt, stiff, pedantic, artificial, systematic as a country cemetery, and, worst of all, the whole time desperately in love. Every verse is as flat, thin, and regular as a lath, and their poems are nothing more than pastorals was not so much in their matter as their manner. They show a sense of style in its larger meaning hitherto displayed by no English poet since Chaucer. Surrey had brought back from Italy a certain inkling of it, so far as it is contained in decorum. But here was a new language, a choice and arrangement of words, a vari
Ovid (Michigan, United States) (search for this): chapter 2
n Castle (which, with 3,028 acres of land from the forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond, was confirmed to him by grant two years later), amid scenery at once placid and noble, whose varied charm he felt profoundly. He could not complain, with Ovid,— Non liber hic ullus, non qui mihi commodet aurem, for he was within reach of a cultivated society, which gave him the stimulus of hearty admiration both as poet and scholar. Above all, he was fortunate in a seclusion that prompted study and deake whatever thing doth please the eye? Who rests not pleased with such happiness, Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness. The Muiopotmos pleases us all the more that it vibrates in us a string of classical association by adding an episode to Ovid's story of Arachne. Talking the other day with a friend (the late Mr. Keats) about Dante, he observed that whenever so great a poet told us anything in addition or continuation of an ancient story, he had a right to be regarded as classical autho
Penshurst (United Kingdom) (search for this): chapter 2
Oberon, which, if not quite convincing, is well worth reading for its ingenuity and research. Before the publication of his Shepherd's Calendar in 1579, he had made the acquaintance of Sir Philip Sidney, and was domiciled with him for a time at Penshurst, whether as guest or literary dependant is uncertain. In October, 1579, he is in the household of the Earl of Leicester. In July, 1580, he accompanied Lord Grey de Wilton to Ireland as Secretary, and in that country he spent the rest of his self already a master, at least in verse, and we can trace the studies of Milton, a yet greater master, in the Shepherd's Calendar as well as in the Faery Queen. We have seen that Spenser, under the misleading influence of Sidney It was at Penshurst that he wrote the only specimen that has come down to us, and bad enough it is. I have said that some of Sidney's are pleasing. and Harvey, tried his hand at English hexameters. But his great glory is that he taught his own language to sing an
Tyrone (Pennsylvania, United States) (search for this): chapter 2
Giles Fletcher in his Purple Island (a poem which reminds us of the Faery Queen by the supreme tediousness of its allegory, but in nothing else) set the example in the best verse he ever wrote:— Poorly, poor man, he lived; poorly, poor man, he died. Gradually this poetical tradition established itself firmly as authentic history. Spenser could never have been poor, except by comparison. The whole story of his later days has a strong savor of legend. He must have had ample warning of Tyrone's rebellion, and would probably have sent away his wife and children to Cork, if he did not go thither himself. I am inclined to think that he did, carrying his papers with him, and among them the two cantos of Mutability, first published in 1611. These, it is most likely, were the only ones he ever completed, for, with all his abundance, he was evidently a laborious finisher. When we remember that ten years were given to the elaboration of the first three books, and that five more elapse
County Cork (Irish Republic) (search for this): chapter 2
penser prefixed to the Globe edition. In 1594 he had been married to the lady celebrated in his somewhat artificial amoretti. By her he had four children. He was now at the height of his felicity; by universal acclaim the first poet of his age, and the one obstacle to his material advancement (if obstacle it was) had been put out of the way by the death of Lord Burleigh, August, 1598. In the next month he was recommended in a letter from Queen Elizabeth for the shrievalty of the county of Cork. But alas for Polycrates! In October the wild kerns and gallowglasses rose in no mood for sparing the house of Pindarus. They sacked and burned his castle, from which he with his wife and children barely escaped. Ben Jonson told Drummond that one child perished in the flames. But he was speaking after an interval of twenty-one years, and, of course, from hearsay. Spenser's misery was exaggerated by succeeding poets, who used him to point a moral, and from the shelter of his tomb launc
Fort Bedford (Pennsylvania, United States) (search for this): chapter 2
es home to none of us in particular, the story of any one man's real experience finds its startling parallel in that of every one of us. The very homeliness of Bunyan's names and the everydayness of his scenery, too, put us off our guard, and we soon find ourselves on as easy a footing with his allegorical beings as we might be with Adam or Socrates in a dream. Indeed, he has prepared us for such incongruities by telling us at setting out that the story was of a dream. The long nights of Bedford jail had so intensified his imagination, and made the figures with which it peopled his solitude so real to him, that the creatures of his mind become things, as clear to the memory as if we had seen them. But Spenser's are too often mere names, with no bodies to back them, entered on the Muses' muster-roll by the specious trick of personification. There is, likewise, in Bunyan, a childlike simplicity and taking-for-granted which win our confidence. His Giant Despair, Bunyan probably
Scotia (search for this): chapter 2
1580, he accompanied Lord Grey de Wilton to Ireland as Secretary, and in that country he spent thdes as the Scythians In his prose tract on Ireland, Spenser, perhaps with some memory of Ovid in poet. Spenser himself looked on his life in Ireland as a banishment. In his Colin Clout's come HColin Clout, written just after his return to Ireland, he speaks of the Court in a tone of contemptnd Peregrine, indicate that they were born in Ireland, and that Spenser continued to regard it as aess of an imaginary servant on their way from Ireland. He sought shelter in London and died there oy have been aimed at the Protestant clergy of Ireland (for he says much the same thing in his View of the State of Ireland), but it is general in its terms. There is an iconoclastic relish in his acf Milton's, though differing in structure. of Ireland becomes a turf of Arcady under her feet, wher race. He was the more English for living in Ireland, and there is something that moves us deeply
Westminster (Maryland, United States) (search for this): chapter 2
s he ever completed, for, with all his abundance, he was evidently a laborious finisher. When we remember that ten years were given to the elaboration of the first three books, and that five more elapsed before the next three were ready, we shall waste no vain regrets on the six concluding books supposed to have been lost by the carelessness of an imaginary servant on their way from Ireland. He sought shelter in London and died there on the 16th January, 1599, at a tavern in King Street, Westminster. He was buried in the neighboring Abbey next to Chaucer, at the cost of the Earl of Essex, poets bearing his pall and casting verses into his grave. He died poor, but not in want. On the whole, his life may be reckoned a happy one, as in the main the lives of the great poets must have commonly been. If they feel more passionately the pang of the moment, so also the compensations are incalculable, and not the least of them this very capacity of passionate emotion. The real good fortu
Walsingham (Florida, United States) (search for this): chapter 2
of the indifference of the court to learning and literature is the more remarkable because he himself was by no means an unsuccessful suitor. Queen Elizabeth bestowed on him a pension of fifty pounds, and shortly after he received the grant of lands already mentioned. It is said, indeed, that Lord Burleigh in some way hindered the advancement of the poet, who more than once directly alludes to him either in reproach or remonstrance. In The Ruins of Time, after speaking of the death of Walsingham, Since whose decease learning lies unregarded, And men of armes do wander unrewarded, he gives the following reason for their neglect:— For he that now wields all things at his will, Scorns tha one and tha other in his deeper skill. O grief of griefs! O gall of all good hearts, To see that virtue should despised be Of him that first was raised for virtuous parts, And now, broad-spreading like an aged tree, Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted be: O let the man of whom the Muse
Bologna (Italy) (search for this): chapter 2
ecay of might, It strength to me supplies, and cheers my dulled spright. Spenser seems here to confess a little weariness; but the alacrity of his mind is so great that, even where his invention fails a little, we do not share his feeling nor suspect it, charmed as we are by the variety and sweep of his measure, the beauty or vigor of his similes, the musical felicity of his diction, and the mellow versatility of his pictures. In this last quality Ariosto, whose emulous pupil he was, is as Bologna to Venice in the comparison. That, when the personal allusions have lost their meaning and the allegory has become a burden, the book should continue to be read with delight, is proof enough, were any wanting, how full of life and light and the other-worldliness of poetry it must be. As a narrative it has, I think, every fault of which that kind of writing is capable. The characters are vague, and, even were they not, they drop out of the story so often and remain out of it so long, that
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