t Wedding Ode, the
_Epithalamion_, the finest composition of its kind, probably, in any
language: so impetuous and unflagging, so orderly and yet so rapid in
the onward march of its stately and varied stanzas; so passionate, so
flashing with imaginative wealth, yet so refined and self-restrained. It
was always easy for Spenser to open the floodgates of his inexhaustible
fancy. With him,--

The numbers flow as fast as spring doth rise.

But here he has thrown into his composition all his power of
concentration, of arrangement, of strong and harmonious government over
thought and image, over language and measure and rhythm; and the result
is unquestionably one of the grandest lyrics in English poetry. We have
learned to think the subject unfit for such free poetical treatment;
Spenser's age did not.

Of the lady of whom all this was said, and for whom all this was
written, the family name has not been thought worth preserving. We know
that by her Christian name she was a namesake of the great queen, and of
Spenser's mother. She is called a country lass, which may mean anything;
and the marriage appears to have been solemnized in Cork, on what was
then Midsummer Day, "Barnaby the Bright," the day when "the sun is in
his cheerful height," June 11/22, 1594. Except that she survived
Spenser, that she married again, and had some legal quarrels with one of
her own sons about his lands, we know nothing more about her. Of two of
the children whom she brought him, the names have been preserved, and
they indicate that in spite of love and poetry, and the charms of
Kilcolman, Spenser felt as Englishmen feel in Australia or in India. To
call one of them _Sylvanus_, and the other _Peregrine_, reveals to us
that Ireland was still to him a "salvage land," and he a pilgrim and
stranger in it; as Moses called his firstborn Gershom, a stranger
here--"for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land."

In the year after his marriage, he sent over these memorials of it to be
published in London, and they were entered at Stationers' Hall in
November, 1595. The same year he came over himself, bringing with him
the second instalment of the _Faery Queen_, which was entered for
publication the following January, 1595/6. Thus the half of the
projected work was finished; and finished, as we know from one of the
Sonnets (80), before his marriage. After his long "race through Fairy
land," he asks leave to rest, and solace himself with h