“And more, to lull him in his slumber soft,
    A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down,
    And ever drizzling rain upon the loft
    Mix’d with a murmuring wind, much like the sound
    Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swound,*
    No other noise nor peoples’ troublous cries,
    As still are wont t’ annoy the walled town,
    Might there be heard; but careless quiet lies
    Wrapt in eternal silence, far from enemies.”

    Swoon.

So all through the poem we are enchanted or lulled by the glamor of words.

The Faery Queen made Spenser as a poet famous, but, as we know, it did not bring him enough to live on in England.  It did not bring him the fame he sought nor make him great among the statesmen of the land.  Among the courtiers of Queen Elizabeth he counted for little.  So he returned to Ireland a disappointed man.  It was now he wrote Colin Clout’s come home again, from which I have already given you some quotations.  He published also another book of poems and then he fell in love.  He forgot his beautiful Rosalind, who had been so hard-hearted, and gave his love to another lady who in her turn loved him, and to whom he was happily married.  This lady, too, he made famous in his verse.  As the fashion was, he wrote to her a series of sonnets, in one of which we learn that her name was Elizabeth.  He writes to the three Elizabeths, his mother, his Queen, and

    “The third, my love, my life’s last ornament,
    By whom my spirit out of dust was raised.”

But more famous still than the sonnets is the Epithalamion or wedding hymn which he wrote in his lady’s honor, and which ever since has been looked on as the most glorious love-song in the English language, so full is it of exultant, worshipful happiness.

It was now, too, that Spenser wrote Astrophel, a sadly beautiful dirge for the death of his friend and fellow-poet, Sir Philip Sidney.  He gave his verses as “fittest flowers to deck his mournful hearse.”

Just before his marriage Spenser finished three more books of the Faery Queen, and the following year he took them to London to publish them.  The three books were on Friendship, on Justice, and on Courtesy.  They were received as joyfully as the first three.  The poet remained for nearly a year in London still writing busily.  Then he returned to Ireland.  There he passed a few more years, and then came the end.

Ireland, which had always been unquiet, always restless, under the oppressive hand of England, now broke out into wild rebellion.  The maddened Irish had no love or respect for the English poet.  Kilcolman Castle was sacked and burned, and Spenser fled with his wife and children to Cork, homeless and wellnigh ruined.  A little later Spenser himself went on to London, hoping perhaps to better his fortunes, and there in a Westminster inn, disappointed, ill, shattered in hopes and health, he lay down to die.