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When I knew myself again, I was lying with my head in a maiden's lap, and well I could have believed that the fairies had carried me to their own land, as has befallen many, whereof some have returned to earth with the tale, and some go yet in that unearthly company. "Gentle demoiselle, are you the gracious Queen of Faerie?" I asked, as one half-wakened, not knowing what I said.
But Keats's art was retrospective and eclectic, the blossom of a double root; and "golden-tongued Romance with serene lute" had her part in him, as well as the classics. In his seventeenth year he had read the Faerie Queene, and from Spenser he went on to a study of Chaucer, Shakspere and Milton. Then he took up Italian and read Ariosto.
What glorious girls' names some of the boats had that we prayed for 'Diana Elizabeth, for instance, might have sailed out of the 'Faerie Queene. Went to church at Saint Paul's in a side chapel. Went to pray in a cemetery chapel. Both were misty mornings, but the sun each day came out before we had done, and broke through the dingy windows in a carnage of color.
After lunch Sir Charles took Mark to see his library, which reminded him of a Rossetti interior and lacked only a beautiful long-necked creature, full-lipped and auburn-haired, to sit by the casement languishing over a cithern or gazing out through bottle-glass lights at a forlorn and foreshortened landscape of faerie land.
Again, Ferne and young Sedley, pacing the poop beneath a sky of starry splendor, and falling silent after talk that had travelled from Petrarch and Ariosto to that Faerie Queene which Edmund Spenser was writing, heard a faint sweet singing far across the deep. "Hark!" breathed Sedley. "The strange sweet sound.... Surely mermaiden singing!" "I know not," replied Ferne, his hands upon the railing.
At Abergwylly, near Caermarthen, is still shown the cave of the prophet and the scene of his incantations. How beautiful is the description of it given by Spenser in his "Faerie Queene." The lines need no apology for their repetition here, and any sketch of the great prophet of Britain would be incomplete without them :
But in his own day he was the poet of England at large. The "Faerie Queen" was received with a burst of general welcome. It became "the delight of every accomplished gentleman, the model of every poet, the solace of every soldier." The poem expressed indeed the very life of the time.
But bright as was the promise of coming song, no great imaginative poem had broken the silence of English literature for nearly two hundred years when Spenser landed at Bristol with the "Faerie Queen." From that moment the stream of English poetry has flowed on without a break.
"Seeing's believing. I never trust runaway rogues. If they are false to their masters, they'll be false to us." "Well, go thy ways, old honesty; and Mr. Secretary shall give you a book to yourself in the 'Faerie Queene' 'Sir Monoculus or the Legend of Common Sense, eh, Edmund?" "Monoculus?" "Ay, Single-eye, my prince of word-coiners won't that fit? And give him the Cyclops head for a device.
To modern eyes perhaps there is something grotesque in the strange medley of figures that crowd the canvas of the "Faerie Queen," in its fauns dancing on the sward where knights have hurtled together, in its alternation of the salvage-men from the New World with the satyrs of classic mythology, in the giants, dwarfs, and monsters of popular fancy who jostle with the nymphs of Greek legend and the damosels of mediæval romance.
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