The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 13, November, 1858

Droop in the sun.

'Neath the noon's scorching glare
Fainting I stand;
Still is the sultry air,
Silentness everywhere
Through the hot land.

Yet must I labor still,
All the day through,—
Striving with earnest will
Patient my place to fill,
My work to do.

Long though my task may be,
Cometh the end.
God 'tis that helpeth me,
His is the work, and He
New strength will lend.

He will direct my feet,
Strengthen my hand,
Give me my portion meet;—
Firm in his promise sweet
Trusting I'll stand.

Up, then, to work again!
God's word is given
That none shall sow in vain,
But find his ripened grain
Garnered in heaven.

Longer the shadows fall,—
Night cometh on;
Low voices softly call,
"Come, here is rest for all!
Labor is done!"

COLIN CLOUT AND THE FAËRY QUEEN

EDMUND SPENSER IN A DOMESTIC POINT OF VIEW. HIS MISTRESS AND HIS WIFE

PART I.—HIS MISTRESS

The "Faëry Queen" of Edmund Spenser is before us,—a vast and glittering mausoleum, in which the purpose of the constructor has long been entombed, we fear without hope of a happy resurrection. Nevertheless, into this splendid ruin, hieroglyphed with the most brilliant images the modern mind has yet conceived, we are about to dig,—not with the impious desire of dragging forth the intellectual tenant, now in the fourth century of its everlasting repose, but, haply, to discover in the outer chambers and passages of the pyramid some relics of the individual architect, his family and mode of life. In fact, we are anxious to make the acquaintance of Mistress Spenser and introduce her to the American public. A slight sketch of the poet's life, up to the period of his marriage, may afford us some clue to the quarter from which he selected his bride; we shall therefore give what is known of him in the fewest possible words.

Edmund Spenser, by family, was English, and by birth a cockney. In his "Prothalamion" he thus pleads guilty to the chime of Bow-bells in his infant ear:—

"At length they all to merrie London came,
To merrie London, my most kindly nurse,
That to me gave this life's first native source;
Though from another place I take my name
And house of ancient fame."

At what time of his life he became connected with Ireland is very uncertain; it was probably early. At or about the time of Sir Henry Sidney's vice-royalty, or in the interval between that and the lieutenancy of Lord Grey De Wilton, there was a "Mr. Spenser" actively and confidentially employed by the Irish government; and that this may have been the poet is, from collateral circumstances, far from improbable. Spenser was the friend and protégé of Sir Philip Sidney, (son of the before-named Sir Henry,) and of his uncle, the Earl of Leicester. Lord Grey De Wilton was by marriage connected with both, and lived with them on terms of the closest intimacy, social, literary, and political. In choosing an officer, then, for so important a post as that of secretary, whom would the one select or the others more confidently recommend than a young man of genius, known to all the parties, and who already had some knowledge and experience of Irish affairs? Be this as it may, we know that in 1580, Spenser, then in his twenty-seventh year, accompanied Lord Grey De Wilton into Ireland as secretary; and that he had been there before, in some official capacity not undistinguished, is evidenced by the fact, that the Lord Justice, previously to his arrival, speaks of him as "having many ways deserved some consideration from her Majesty."

We do not care to inquire into the peculiar services for which he was so speedily favored with a large grant of lands forfeited by the Desmonds. Such official transactions, we fear, would reflect little credit on the poet; no doubt he was a good man—according to the morality of his age; and if he did suggest the poisoning of a few thousand human beings of all ages and both sexes, (some go so far as to allege that his fervid imagination contemplated the utter extermination of the race,) he merely acted up to the opinions prevalent in the time and polished court of "Good Queen Bess." The beings were "mere Irishry,"—a stumbling-block in the path of British civilization, and therefore to be removed, per fas et nefas.

Spenser took up his residence on the forfeit lands in Cork; there married, and reared a family which inherited his estate; that he subsequently died in England was as mere a casualty as that by which Swift was born in Ireland. Certain it is that the greater and the better portion of his works in prose and verse was composed during his residence in the land of his adoption. Thus, in the sonnets appended to the "Faëry Queen," the poem on which his celebrity rests, he addresses this Earl of Ormond:—

"Receive, most noble lord, a single taste
Of the wilde fruit which savage soyle hath bred;
Which, beeing through long wars left almost waste,
With brutish barbarisme is overspred."

Again, addressing himself to his patron, Lord Grey, he says,—

"Rude rimes, the which a rustick nurse did weave
In savage soyle, far from Parnasso Mount."

Several other of the finest productions of his brain owe their birth to the "savage soyle" of Ireland; his descriptions of the country, his dialogue on Irish affairs, his "Amoretti" and "Colin Clout's come home again," belong confessedly to this category.

Having discovered thus much about the poet, we now strike out in a new direction in search of his better half. Upon this point, unfortunately, there hangs a mist,—not impenetrable, as we conceive, but yet impenetrated,—a secret to which the given clue has been neglected, and which remains to the present day the opprobrium of a careless biography. The fact and the date of his marriage in Ireland are obtained from his own writings; but, further than that her name was Elizabeth,—a fact recorded by himself,—the lady of his choice remains unknown, her maiden name and family. Mere trifles these, to be sure,—but interesting in an antiquarian point of view,—and valuable, perhaps, should the inquiry hereafter lead some more than usually acute bookworm into the real mystery and meaning, the main drift of that inexplicable "Faëry Queen."

One difficulty in the matter is, that Edmund appears to have been a "susceptible subject." He was twice attacked with the tender malady, and records, in glowing numbers, his passion for two mistresses. One he calls Rosalinde, and celebrates in the "Shepherd's Calendar"; the other, Elizabeth, to whom he was undoubtedly married, is the theme of admiration in his "Amoretti." Rosalinde was his early love; Elizabeth, the passion of his maturer years. When six-and-twenty, hopeless of Rosalinde, he wound up his philomel complainings of her cruelty by a formal commission to his friend Gabriel Harvey (Hobbinoll) to declare his suit at an end:—

"Adieu, good Hobbinoll, that was so true;
Tell Rosalinde her Colin bids adieu."

It took him fourteen years—surely a sufficient time!—to recover from this disappointment; for he is in his forty-first year, when, in his Sixtieth Sonnet, he represents himself as having been then one year enamored of Elizabeth:—

"So since the winged god his planet cleare
Began in me to move, one yeare is spent;
The which doth longer unto me appears
Than all those fourty which my life outwent."

That Rosalinde was not, as has been somewhat rashly conjectured, the poetic name of Elizabeth, is conclusively established by a poem written between 1591 and 1595, in which he speaks of some insurmountable barrier between them, why "her he might not love."[4 - : See Colin Clout's come home again.] The wife he loved, and the mistress between whose love and him there existed such a barrier, could not have been the same person, it is evident. But who this fair and false Rosalinde was, though known to many of his contemporaries, has become a mystery. That she was a real personage is placed beyond cavil by "E.K.," the ostensible editor of the "Shepherd's Calendar"; and he has given us a clue to her name, if we have but the wit to follow it. Now "E.K." we more than shrewdly suspect to have been either Spenser himself, or his friend Gabriel Harvey, or both together. Two more egregious self-laudators are not to be found in the range of English literature: Spenser loses no opportunity of puffing "Colin Clout"; and Harvey was openly charged by Thomas Nash with having forged commendatory epistles and sonnets in his own praise, under the name of Thorius etc. "E.K.," therefore, must be considered as pretty high authority; and what says "E.K."? Why, this: "Rosalinde is also a feigned name, which, being well ordered, will bewray the verie name of his love and mistresse." By "well ordering" the "feigned name" E.K. undoubtedly means disposing or arranging the letters of which it is composed in some form of anagram or metagram,—a species of wit much cultivated by the most celebrated poets of the time, Spenser included, and not deemed beneath the dignity of the learned Camden to expound.

A few examples of this "alchemy of wit," as Camden calls it, will reconcile our modern notions of the [Greek: to trepon] with the puerile ingenuity thought graceful, at that unripe period of our literature, by some of the most accomplished writers and readers of the day. Let us take an extravagant instance. Sir Philip Sidney, having abridged his own name into Phil. Sid., anagrammatized it into Philisides. Refining still further, he translated Sid., the abridgment of sidus, into [Greek: astron], and, retaining the Phil., as derived from [Greek: philos], he constructed for himself another pseudonym and adopted the poetical name of Astrophil. Feeling, moreover, that the Lady Rich, celebrated in his sonnets, was the loadstar of his affections, he designates her, in conformity with his own assumed name, Stella. Christopher Marlow's name is transmuted into Wormal, and the royal Elizabetha is frequently addressed as Ah-te-basile! Doctor Thomas Lodge, author of "Rosalinde; or Euphues, his Golden Legacy," (which Shakspeare dramatized into "As you like it,") has anagrammatized his own name into Golde,—and that of Dering into Ringde. The author of "Dolarney's Primrose" was a Doctor Raynolde. John Hind, in his "Eliosto Libidinoso," transmutes his own name into Dinchin Matthew Roydon becomes Donroy. And Shakspeare, even, does not scruple to alchemize the Resolute John, or John Florio, into the pedantic Holofernes of "Love's Labor's Lost." A thousand such fantastic instances of "trifling with the letter" might be quoted; and even so late as the reign of Queen Anne we find this foolish wit indulged. The cynical Swift[5 - Vide Scott's Life.] stoops to change Miss Waring into Varina; Esther (quasi Aster, a star) Johnson is known as Stella; Essy Van-homrigh figures as Vanessa; while Cadenus, by an easy change of syllables, is resolved into Decanus, or the Dean himself in propriâ personâ and canonicals.

In the "Shepherd's Calendar," the very poem in which Spenser's unknown mistress figures as Rosalinde, the poet has alchemized Grindal, Archbishop of Canterbury, into Algrind, and made Ellmor, Bishop of London, Morell, (it is to be hoped he was so before,) by merely transposing the letters. What wonder, then, if, complying with an art so general and convenient, he should be found contriving, in the case of both his mistresses at once, to reveal his passion and conceal the name of his enslaver from the public gaze?

The prolific hint of "E.K." set the commentators at work,—but hitherto without success. The author of the life prefixed to Church's edition conjectures Rose Linde,—forsooth, because it appears from Fuller's "Worthies," that in the reign of Henry the Sixth—only eight reigns too early for the birth of our rural beauty—there was one John Linde, a resident in the County of Kent! Not satisfied with this conjecture, Malone suggests that she may have been an Eliza Horden—the z changed, according to Camden's rules, into s, and the aspirate sunk. Malone's foundation for this theory is, that one Thomas Horden was a contemporary of John Linde, aforesaid, and resided in the same county! Both these conjectures are absurd and unsupported by any collateral evidence. To have given them the remotest air of probability, the critics should have proved some acquaintance or connection between the parties respectively, —some courtship, or contiguity of residence, which might have brought the young people within the ordinary sphere of attraction. Wrong as they were in their conclusions, the search of these commentators was in the right direction. The anagram, "well-ordered," will undoubtedly bewray the secret. Let us try if we may not follow it with better success.

Rosalinde reads, anagrammatically, into Rose Daniel; for, according to Camden, "a letter may be doubled, or rejected, or contrariwise, if the sense fall aptly"; we thus get rid of the redundant e, and have a perfect anagram. Now Spenser had an intimate and beloved friend and brother-poet, named Samuel Daniel, author of many tragedies and comedies, an eight-canto poem called "The Civil Wars of England," "A Vision of Twelve Goddesses," a prose history of England, and "Musa," a defence of rhyme. Spenser alludes to his poetic genius with high praise in his "Colin Clout." This Daniel had a sister named Rose, who was married in due time to a friend of her brother's,—not, indeed, to Spenser, but to a scholar, whose eccentricities have left such durable tracks behind them, that we can trace his mark through many passages of Spenser's love complaints, otherwise unintelligible. The supposition that Rose Daniel was Rosalinde satisfies every requisite, and presents a solution of the mystery; the anagram is perfect; the poet's acquaintance with the brother naturally threw him into contact with the sister; while the circumstance of her marriage with another justifies the complaint of infidelity, and accounts for the "insurmountable barrier," that is, a living husband. Daniel was the early protégé of the Pembroke family, as was Spenser of the house of Leicester. The youthful poets must often have met in the company of their mutual friend, Sir Philip Sidney,—for the Countess of Pembroke was the "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," celebrated by Ben Jonson, and consequently niece, as Sir Philip was nephew, of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Rose and Edmund were thus thrown together under circumstances every way favorable to the development of love in a breast so susceptible as that of the "passionate shepherd."

Other circumstances in the life of Rose Daniel correspond so strikingly with those attributed to Rosalinde, as strongly to corroborate the foregone conclusion.

Rosalinde, after having given encouragement to her enamored shepherd, faithlessly and finally deserted him in favor of a rival. This is evident throughout the "Shepherd's Calendar." The First Eclogue reveals his passion:—