3.  It is an age of dreams, of adventure, of unbounded enthusiasm springing from the new lands of fabulous riches revealed by English explorers.  Drake sails around the world, shaping the mighty course which English colonizers shall follow through the centuries; and presently the young philosopher Bacon is saying confidently, “I have taken all knowledge for my province.”  The mind must search farther than the eye; with new, rich lands opened to the sight, the imagination must create new forms to people the new worlds.  Hakluyt’s famous Collection of Voyages, and Purchas, His Pilgrimage, were even more stimulating to the English imagination than to the English acquisitiveness.  While her explorers search the new world for the Fountain of Youth, her poets are creating literary works that are young forever.  Marston writes:[114] “Why, man, all their dripping pans are pure gold.  The prisoners they take are fettered in gold; and as for rubies and diamonds, they goe forth on holydayes and gather ’hem by the seashore to hang on their children’s coates.”  This comes nearer to being a description of Shakespeare’s poetry than of the Indians in Virginia.  Prospero, in The Tempest, with his control over the mighty powers and harmonies of nature, is only the literary dream of that science which had just begun to grapple with the forces of the universe.  Cabot, Drake, Frobisher, Gilbert, Raleigh, Willoughby, Hawkins,—­a score of explorers reveal a new earth to men’s eyes, and instantly literature creates a new heaven to match it.  So dreams and deeds increase side by side, and the dream is ever greater than the deed.  That is the meaning of literature.

4.  To sum up, the Age of Elizabeth was a time of intellectual liberty, of growing intelligence and comfort among all classes, of unbounded patriotism, and of peace at home and abroad.  For a parallel we must go back to the Age of Pericles in Athens, or of Augustus in Rome, or go forward a little to the magnificent court of Louis XIV, when Corneille, Racine, and Moliere brought the drama in France to the point where Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson had left it in England half a century earlier.  Such an age of great thought and great action, appealing to the eyes as well as to the imagination and intellect, finds but one adequate literary expression; neither poetry nor the story can express the whole man,—­his thought, feeling, action, and the resulting character; hence in the Age of Elizabeth literature turned instinctively to the drama and brought it rapidly to the highest stage of its development.

II.  THE NON-DRAMATIC POETS OF THE ELIZABETHAN AGE

EDMUND SPENSER (1552-1599)

    (Cuddie)
        “Piers, I have piped erst so long with pain
        That all mine oaten reeds been rent and wore,
        And my poor Muse hath spent her spared store,
        Yet little good hath got, and much less gain.