ion of Munster, and the
practical interest he took in the "barren soil where cold and want and
poverty do grow" was shown by the later publication of a prose tractate
on the condition and government of the island. It was at Dublin or in
his castle of Kilcolman, two miles from Doneraile, "under the foot of
Mole, that mountain hoar," that he spent the ten years in which Sidney
died and Mary fell on the scaffold and the Armada came and went; and it
was in the latter home that Walter Raleigh found him sitting "alwaies
idle," as it seemed to his restless friend, "among the cooly shades of
the green alders by the Mulla's shore" in a visit made memorable by the
poem of "Colin Clout's come home again."

[Sidenote: The Faerie Queen.]

But in the "idlesse" and solitude of the poet's exile the great work
begun in the two pleasant years of his stay at Penshurst had at last
taken form, and it was to publish the first three books of the "Faerie
Queen" that Spenser returned in Raleigh's company to London. The
appearance of the "Faerie Queen" in 1590 is the one critical event in
the annals of English poetry; it settled in fact the question whether
there was to be such a thing as English poetry or no. The older national
verse which had blossomed and died in Caedmon sprang suddenly into a
grander life in Chaucer, but it closed again in a yet more complete
death. Across the Border indeed the Scotch poets of the fifteenth
century preserved something of their master's vivacity and colour, and
in England itself the Italian poetry of the Renascence had of late found
echoes in Surrey and Sidney. The new English drama too was beginning to
display its wonderful powers, and the work of Marlowe had already
prepared the way for the work of Shakspere. 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. There have been times, as
in the years which immediately followed, when England has "become a nest
of singing birds"; there have been times when song was scant and poor;
but there never has been a time when England was wholly without a
singer.

The new English verse has been true to the source from which it sprang,
and Spenser has always been "the poet's poet." But in his own day he was
the poet of England at large. The "Faer