No ravenous wolves the good man's hope destroy,
No outlaws fell affright the forest ranger.
There learned arts do flourish in great honor,

And poets' wits are had in peerless price:

Religion hath lay power to rest upon her,
Advancing virtue and suppressing vice.

For end [or, finally], all good, all grace, there freely grows,
Had people grace it gratefully to use;

For God his gifts there plenteously bestows,

But graceless men them greatly do abuse.

After reading this description, it is easy to judge how far the condition of England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth may be supposed to have been in the eye of the poet, who must rather be supposed to have had in view the "Fortunate Isle," which is said to be

"Full of good things; fruits and trees
And pleasant verdure; a very master-piece
Of Nature's; where the men immortally

Live, following all delights and pleasures."

If the reader still has any doubt on the subject, let him mark the description of the Queen, the Arcadian Queen, beginning at line 330:

ร

Forth on our voyage we by land did pass,

(Quoth he) as that same shepherd still us guided.

The reader should by no means lose sight of the statement that the man continues upon the journey under the guidance of that same Strange Shepherd, by whom he was first persuaded to leave the 99 waste or desert where the two shepherds met each other, which surely was the figurative Egypt:

66

Forth on our voyage we by land did pass,
As that same shepherd still us guided,
Until we to Cynthia's presence came :
Whose glory, greater than my simple thought,
I found much greater than the former fame;
Such greatness I cannot compare to aught;
But if I her like aught on earth might read,
I would liken her to a crown of lilies,
Upon a virgin bride's adorned head,

With roses dight, and goolds and daffodillies;

Or like the circlet of a turtle true

In which all colours of the rainbow be;
Or like Phoebe's garland shining new,

In which all pure perfection one may see.
But vain it is to think, by paragone

Of earthly things, to judge of things divine:
Her power, her mercy, and her wisdom, none
Can deem, but who the Godhead can define.
Why then do I, base shepherd, bold and blind,
Presume the things so sacred to profane ?
More fit it is t'adore, with humble mind,
The image of the heavens in shape humane.

CHAPTER III.

WE regard it as a mistake to teach that man passes suddenly from a conformity with, not to say a love of, the world, to the fruition of the opposite state, that of devotion to truth and goodness. The impulse to undertake a divine life is doubtless instantaneous, and is often compared to the discovery of a light, as if seen from dense woods in which the man has been lost. This light, or the discovery of it, may be figured as a mustard-seed, the seed of a new life; but the end is not yet. The seeker, on the contrary, may have a long and often a weary road of research to travel; and we take this occasion to say that, in the case of Colin, that is, of Spenser, the poet of the Faerie Queen, that research is represented in the Amoretti Sonnets, which were not addressed, as generally supposed, to a particular lady, whom Spenser is said to have subsequently married. When those Sonnets begin to be under

stood, the absurdity of treating them as love-sonnets, in the popular sense of the expression, will become very apparent. They are indeed love-sonnets, and are properly named according to the theory of the time; but the object of the love is the mystical divinity of the poets, as we may show at another time. We merely observe now, that the poet does not, at the outset, understand definitely the object he is in search of. He is impelled, by a sort of divine faith in the Strange Shepherd, to seek the mystic queen, as represented in Colin Clouts, in lines 192, &c.:

So what with hope of good and hate of ill,
He me persuaded forth with him to fare.

That the man takes with him, in following the Strange Shepherd, only his "oaten quill" (line 194), contains an important hint, that the search after the true life is something peculiarly individual; for, in one word, in the presence of God every soul ultimately becomes its own judge of itself, through its own spirit, which in this poem is figured by the -oaten quill; and it is so figured because the soul is in some sort a musical instrument, which only needs to be properly tuned, or attuned to the divine har

mony, to find itself in unison with the Spirit of Truth, the Strange Shepherd of the poem.

We lose much of the truth and beauty of the Psalms when we think of King David as actually seated at a harp. It is possible, indeed, that a King may have some skill in the mechanical use of an actual musical instrument; but this would be of little importance in the case of David, or in our thought of him, if we did not understand that his soul was his real harp, in such wise as that the expressions, "awake my harp," and "awake my spirit," signify the same thing.

The "sea" upon which Colin is about to set forth is the Sea of Life, where the waters are said (line 197)

to be heaped u on high,

Rolling like mountains in wide wilderness,

Horrible, hideous, and roaring with hoarse cry.

To see the force of this similitude may require an experience of some years in the world, for Byron tells us that we know nothing of it while "youth's hot blood runs in our veins.” Hence it comes that youth is well represented (line 216), as a ship of