to which ordinary mortals have no ready access; and then, secondly, by his Coming Home Again is to be understood his coming down to ordinary life, to give us a poetic description of what he saw in the spiritual world, using this expression metaphorically; for the eye hath not seen nor hath the ear heard what is said and done in the Arcadian Land.

CHAPTER IV.

REMARKS ON THE AMORETTI, OR SONNETS OF SPENSER.

HAVING explained the meaning and purpose of Colin Clouts Come Home Again, we think it necessary to express the opinion we entertain of the Sonnets of Spenser, which, like those of Shakespeare, we regard as hermetic studies.

We desire to confess that the field of inquiry has grown considerably under the view of the writer since he first undertook to explain the purpose of the small poem just named. much that he feels the

Indeed, it has grown so necessity of using some

violence in the effort to bring his remarks to a close.

We have said that Spenser, in Colin Clouts, has presented, in a hermetic poem, his view of a Christian life-the life of a man led by the Spirit

of Christ; and that he figures the rewards of such a life by what he says of the "land" of Cynthia and its Queen.

We feel called upon to point out what we think of the Amoretti Sonnets, because we regard them as having an intimate relation to what is set forth in the poem; for, in the Sonnets, we recognize the contemplative studies of the poet on the profoundest problems of life, disclosed, or, if the reader chooses, concealed, in hermetic writing-the form of writing used in both Colin Clouts and the Amoretti.

We say that the Sonnets of Spenser were not addressed to any particular person, but, like those of Shakespeare and of many of the poets in the early stages of English poetry, they enclose the speculative opinions of their writers upon nature and life.

Referring to the remarks on the Sonnets of Shakespeare, we repeat that several of the poets of the earlier ages of English poesy, following precedents as old as Grecian literature (see Shakespeare's Sonnet 108), were essentially students of Nature, shrouding their inquiries and speculations, so far as they made them known at all, in a mystical style of writing, such as we now see in the Sonnets left us by many of the poets prior to the time of

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Dryden. After the Reformation had become an acknowledged fact, that style of writing appears, for the most part, to have been abandoned. The most extensive series of sonnets recently published are those of Wordsworth; but there is nothing mystical in them. Prior to Wordsworth's time, one great cause of mysterious writing had been in a great degree removed, for men were no longer burned at the stake for their opinions.

In Spenser's time, and prior to it, the Reformers, or those who sought to live above the superstitions of the time, resorted to hermetic writings; and the poets, for the most part, adopted the sonnet as the vehicle of their opinions and speculations, Chaucer and some others, however, using poems in the form of tales and dreams. In the main, whatever special opinions they attained, the practice was almost universal of using personifications in expressing them; and as Nature, in the eye of a poet, is anything but a mere inert mass of dead matterbeing rather "the glorious image of the Maker's beauty" (Amoretti, 61)-they usually set forward, as the figure for their sense of the Beautiful, the most beautiful object in Nature; and that is, confessedly, on all hands, a beautiful woman.