scale a gate belonging to the farm on which the ruin stands, and advance on foot, through a farm-yard, and along the lake side. The remains of the castle, which consist only of part of the tower, at the southernmost corner, stand on a green mound of considerable extent, overlooking the lake, or rather a winding sort of pond, overgrown with potamogeton. On one side, masses of limestone rock, on which the castle, too, stands, protrude from the banks, and on the other extends the green marsh, and the black peat bogs, with their piles of peat stacks. To the north, at about a mile's distance, stretch those brown moorland mountains, called by the natives the Ballyhowra Hills, but dignified by Spenser with the name of Mole. Of either of these names the peasants seemed to know nothing, but assured me the one nearest to the castle eastward was called Slieve Ruark. Southward, at a couple of miles' distance, stands another somber-looking tower, the remains of an ancient castle, which they called Castle Pook. On a hill, nearer Doneraile westward, are also the ruins of an abbey; so that, probably, in Spenser's time, this scene might be well wooded; these places inhabited by families of the English settlers; and might form some society for him; but at present, nothing can be more wild, dreary, and naked than this scene, and the whole view around. Turn which way you will, you see nothing but naked moorlands, bare and lonely, or scattered with the cabins and potato plots of the peasantry. To the northeast stands, at perhaps half a mile's distance, a mass of plantations, inclosing the house of a Mr. Barry Harold; and that is the only relieving object, except the distant mass of the woods of Doneraile Park, and the bare ranges of mountains that close in this unpicturesque plain at more or less distance.

As I stood on the top of the massy old keep, whose walls are three yards thick, and its winding stairs of slippery gray marble, I seemed to be rather in a dream of Spenser's castle, than actually at it. The sun was hasten

The hour and the

ing to set, and threw a clear shining light over the whole silent plain, and thousands of pewets and of rooks from Lord Doneraile's woods spread themselves over the green fields near the weedy water, and seemed to enjoy the calm dreamy light and stillness of the scene. scene naturally brought to my mind the melodious stanza of Mickle, which has special reference to this solitary memorial of the history both of Ireland and its troubles, and the English poet of fairy-land and his fate:

"Awake, ye west winds, through the lonely dale,

And Fancy, to thy fairy bower betake;

Even now, with balmy sweetness breathes the gale
Dimpling with downy wing the stilly lake;
Through the pale willows faltering whispers wake
And evening comes with locks bedipped with dew;
On Desmond's mold'ring turrets slowly shake
The withered rye-grass, and the harebell blue,
And ever and anon sweet Mulla's plaints renew."

Looking round over this stripped and lonely landscape, over the "looming flats," over the dark moorland hills that slumber to the north and east, and then far away to more distant but equally sterile mountain ranges, a strange feeling crept over me of the force of events which could compel, nay, make it desirable for the most imaginative spirit of the age, next to Shakspeare, to quit the British capital, the wit and intelligence of Elizabeth's court, to sit down in this wilderness, and in the face of savage and exasperated foes, the poetical eremite, the exile of necessity. But, perhaps, the place then was not so shorn of all embellishment as now. The writer I have quoted seems to imagine that Spenser, by the sheer force of fancy, not only peopled this waste with fauns and nymphs, but clothed it with trees, and other charms of nature. But we must remember that since then, ages of devastation, of desertion, and of an exhausting system, have gone over this country. Then this castle stood fair and complete, and no doubt had its due embellishment and garniture of woodland trees. The green alder not

only overhung the Mulla, but this lake very likely, and a pleasure bark might then add its grace and its life to the view from the castle windows. Todd calls it "the woody Kilcolman," on what authority I know not, and supposes that Spenser calls his first-born son Sylvanus on that account, as its heir. Here he spent twelve years, and, from every thing that we can learn from his poetry, to his own great satisfaction. We can not suppose, therefore, that he found the place without some native charms, far less that he left it without those which planting and cultivation could give it. As Sir Walter Raleigh planted and embellished his estate at Youghal with laurels and other evergreens, there is little doubt that Spenser would do the same here. He would naturally feel a lively and active interest in raising that place and estate, which was to be the family seat of his children, to as high a degree of beauty and amenity as possible. Though busily engaged on his great poem, the Faërie Queene, there is evidence that he was also an active and clever man of business; so much so, that Queen Elizabeth, in preference to all those more aristocratic and more largely land-endowed gentlemen, who were settled with him on the plantations of Munster, had, the very year of his expulsion hence by the Irish rebels, named him to fill the office of sheriff of the county of Cork. That he asserted his rights, appears from a document published by Mr. Hardiman, in his Irish Minstrelsy, showing that he had a dispute with his neighbor, Lord Roche, about some lands, in which, by petitions to the Lord-chancellor of Ireland, it appeared that Edmund Spenser had made forcible claim on these plow-lands at Ballingerath, dispossessed the said Lord Roche, had made great waste of the wood, and appropriated the corn growing on the estate. And the decision was given against Spenser. Spenser was, therefore, evidently quite alive to the value of property.

If we look at what Doneraile is, a perfect paradise of glorious woods, we may imagine what Kilcolman would

have been if, instead of being laid waste with fire and sword by the Irish kerns, and left to become a mere expanse of Irish rack-rent farms and potato grounds, it had been carefully planted, cultivated, and embellished, as the estate of the descendants of one of the proudest names of England. As it is, it stands one more lonely and scathed testimony to the evil fortunes of poets:

"The poets who on earth have made us heirs

Of truth and pure delight, by heavenly lays!"

yet who, themselves, of all men, are still shown by a wise Providence to be "pilgrims and sojourners on the earth, having no abiding city" in it. Their souls have a heavenaspiring tendency. They can not grasp the earth; it escapes from their hold, and they leave behind them, not castles and domains, but golden foot-prints, which, whoever follows, finds them ever and ever leading him upward to the immortal regions.

"For a rich guerdon waits on minds that dare,

If aught be in them of immortal seed,

And reason governs that audacious flight

Which heavenward they direct."— Wordsworth.

In no situations do we so much as in such as these recall the truth uttered by the meditative poet just quoted:

"High is our calling, friend! Creative art—
Whether the instrument of words she use.

Or pencil pregnant with ethereal hues,
Demands the service of a mind and heart,
Though sensitive, yet, in their weakest part,
Heroically fashioned-to infuse

Faith in the whispers of the lonely muse,
While the whole world seems adverse to desert.
And oh! when nature sinks, as oft she may,
Through long-lived pressure of obscure distress,
Still to be strenuous for the bright reward,
And in the soul admit of no decay,
Brook no continuance of weak-mindedness-
Great is the glory, for the strife is hard."

Let us, then, at this moment, rather endeavor to look at the

happiness which Spenser enjoyed here for ten bright years,

than at the melancholy finale.

Here he worked busily

and blissfully at his great poem. Forms of glory, of hign valor and virtue, of female beauty and goodness, floated richly through his mind. The imperial Gloriana, the heavenly Una,

"Whose angel face,

As the great eye of Heaven, shinéd bright,
And made a sunshine in the shady place;"

the sweet Belphoebe, the gallant Britomart, and the brave troop of knights, Arthur the magnanimous, the Red-Cross Knight, the holy and hardly-tried, the just Artegall, and all their triumphs over Archimagos, false Duessas, and the might of dragon natures. This was a life, a labor which clothed the ground with golden flowers, made heaven look forth from between the clouds and the mountain tops, and songs of glory wake on the winds that swept past his towers. Here he accomplished and saw given to the world half his great work-a whole, and an immortal whole as it regarded his fame and great mission in the world-to breathe lofty and unselfish thoughts into the souls of men; to make truth, purity, and high principle the objects of desire.

Here, too, he married the woman of his heart, chosen on the principle of his poetry, not for her lands, but for her beauty and her goodness. Nothing is known of her, not even her name, except that it was Elizabeth, that she was eminently beautiful, and of low degree. Some conjecture her to be of Cork, and a merchant's daughter, but Spenser himself says she was a country lass. Thus, in the Faërie Queene:

"Such were these goddesses which you did see:

But that fourth maid, which there amid them traced
Who can aread what creature may she bee;
Whether a creature, or a goddess graced

With heavenly gifts from heaven first enraced!