sms on poets, the people and courtiers whom
he had seen and heard of; how he had been dazzled, how he had been
disenchanted, and how he was come home to his Irish mountains and
streams and lakes, to enjoy their beauty, though in a "salvage" and
"foreign" land; to find in this peaceful and tranquil retirement
something far better than the heat of ambition and the intrigues of
envious rivalries; and to contrast with the profanations of the name of
love which had disgusted him in a dissolute society, the higher and
purer ideal of it which he could honour and pursue in the simplicity of
his country life.

And in Ireland, the rejected adorer of the Rosalind of the _Shepherd's
Calendar_ found another and still more perfect Rosalind, who, though she
was at first inclined to repeat the cruelty of the earlier one, in time
relented, and received such a dower of poetic glory as few poets have
bestowed upon their brides. It has always appeared strange that
Spenser's passion for the first Rosalind should have been so lasting,
that in his last pastoral, _Colin Clout's come home again_, written so
late as 1591, and published after he was married, he should end his poem
by reverting to this long-past love passage, defending her on the ground
of her incomparable excellence and his own unworthiness, against the
blame of friendly "shepherds," witnesses of the "languors of his too
long dying," and angry with her hard-heartedness. It may be that,
according to Spenser's way of making his masks and figures suggest but
not fully express their antitypes,[168:2] Rosalind here bears the image
of the real mistress of this time, the "country lass," the Elizabeth of
the sonnets, who was, in fact, for a while as unkind as the earlier
Rosalind. The history of this later wooing, its hopes and anguish, its
varying currents, its final unexpected success, is the subject of a
collection of Sonnets, which have the disadvantage of provoking
comparison with the Sonnets of Shakespere. There is no want in them of
grace and sweetness, and they ring true with genuine feeling and warm
affection, though they have of course their share of the conceits then
held proper for love poems. But they want the power and fire, as well as
the perplexing mystery, of those of the greater master. His bride was
also immortalized as a fourth among the three Graces, in a
richly-painted passage in the last book of the _Faery Queen_. But the
most magnificent tribute to her is the grea