thicket
And gather nuttes to make my Christmas game,
And joyed oft to chace the trembling pricket,
Or hunt the hartlesse hare till she were tame.
What wreaked I of wintrie ages waste?
Tho deemed I my spring would ever last.

How often have I scaled the craggie oke
All to dislodge the raven of her nest?
How have I wearied, with many a stroke,
The stately walnut-tree, the while the rest,
Under the tree fell all for nuttes at strife?
For like to me was libertie and life.

To be sure he is here paraphrasing, and also is writing
in the language of pastoral poetry, that is, the
language of this passage is metaphorical; but it is
equally clear that the writer was intimately and
thoroughly acquainted with that life from which the
metaphors of his original are drawn. He describes a
life he had lived.

It seems probable that he was already an author in
some sort when he went up to Cambridge. In the same
year in which he became an undergraduate there appeared
a work entitled, 'A Theatre wherein be represented as
well the Miseries and Calamities that follow the
Voluptuous Worldlings as also the greate Joyes and
Pleasures which the Faithful do enjoy. An Argument
both Profitable and Delectable to all that sincerely
loue the Word of God. Deuised by S. John Vander
Noodt.' Vander Noodt was a native of Brabant who had
sought refuge in England, 'as well for that I would not
beholde the abominations of the Romyshe Antechrist as
to escape the handes of the bloudthirsty.' 'In the
meane space,' he continues, 'for the avoyding of
idlenesse (the very mother and nourice of all vices) I
have among other my travayles bene occupied aboute thys
little Treatyse, wherein is sette forth the vilenesse
and basenesse of worldely things whiche commonly
withdrawe us from heavenly and spirituall matters.'
This work opens with six pieces in the form of sonnets
styled epigrams, which are in fact identical with the
first six of the _Visions of Petrarch_ subsequently
published among Spenser's works, in which publication
they are said to have been 'formerly translated'.
After these so-called epigrams come fifteen _Sonnets_,
eleven of which are easily recognisable amongst the
_Visions of Bellay_, published along with the _Visions
of Petrarch_. There is indeed as little difference
between the two sets of poems as is compatible with the
fact that the old series is written in bla