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Once on the right they caught a distant view of the Towers of Penshurst, and once they heard the deep tolling of the bells of Bayham Abbey, but for the rest of their day's journey savage peasants and squalid cottages were all that met their eyes, with endless droves of pigs who fed upon the litter of acorns.
And the day after, which was enlivened with a happy ramble through the woods to Penshurst, and a sight of that pleasant park and hall, came that conversation with the curate which we have narrated, and which made our young friend think more and more. "Is she all this perfection?" he asked himself. "Has she become serious and religious? Does she tend schools, and visit the poor?
A cup was brought to him, but as he was lifting it to his month he saw a dying soldier staring at it with burning eyes. Philip Sidney paused before tasting it, leaned from the saddle, and handed it to the soldier, saying to him in the same soft, musical voice with which the boy called to his mother in the sunny garden at Penshurst, "Friend, thy necessity is yet greater than mine."
There was a broad, easy mastery of the resources of language, a grace, fluency, and music which were new to English poetry. It was written while Spenser was in service with the Earl of Leicester, and enjoying the friendship of his nephew, the all-accomplished Sidney and it was, perhaps, composed at the latter's country seat of Penshurst.
Penshurst Place was the home of Sir Philip Sidney, and is still owned by a member of the same family. You know that Sir Philip lived in Queen Elizabeth's time, and that his name stands for the model of a perfect courtier and ideal gentleman. He died when he was very young only thirty-two, I think and he did very little which you would suppose could have made him so famous.
The Lord of Penshurst Place is a very wise, appreciative man, and he has made a rule that when any cottage in the village is found to be beyond repair, it shall be replaced by a new house exactly like the original.
Another table of this period was the "folding table," which was made with twelve, sixteen, or with twenty legs, as shewn in the illustration of this example, and which, as its name implies, would shut up into about one third its extended size. There is one of these tables in the Stationers' Hall. Carved and Gilt. Upholstered in rich Silk Velvet. Part of Suite at Penshurst Place.
In his earlier musings at Penshurst the poet had purposed to surpass Ariosto, but the gaiety of Ariosto's song is utterly absent from his own. Not a ripple of laughter breaks the calm surface of Spenser's verse. He is habitually serious, and the seriousness of his poetic tone reflects the seriousness of his poetic purpose.
"The night shall be filled with music, And the cares that infest the day Shall fold their tents like the Arabs, And as silently steal away." The gray walls, the red and peaked roof of the old house of Penshurst, stand in the pleasant English valley of the Medway, in soft and showery Kent. Kent is all garden, and there, in November, 1554, Philip Sidney was born.
Sir John Aylmer remained at Summerley, refusing Guy's pressing invitation to take up his abode at Penshurst. "No, lad," he said; "Lord Eustace and I have been friends and companions for many years, and Lady Margaret has been very dear to me from her childhood. Both would miss me sorely did I leave them, the more so as Agnes is now away.
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