Page:Stories from Old English Poetry-1899.djvu/89

Rh ignorant and barbarous peasantry, who were constantly putting the English residents (whom they hated then, as now) to the fire and sword, they swept down upon the poets castle, burnt and ravaged it, and drove out the inhabitants. In the haste and fear of the attack, a new-born baby was left in the castle, and perished in the flames.

This was too great unhappiness to be borne; and coming to his native city of London, the poet died, three months later, poor and broken-hearted, when hardly forty-eight years old.

His poem of poems is The Faery Queen, written in a measure which has ever since been called Spenserian. By those who do not know its charm, the poem is called stiff, pedantic, and unreadable. But there are those who find in its pages a subtle and pervading atmosphere like that which encompasses the Bower of Bliss, or breathes from the enchanted gardens of Amida; which throws the same spell over the maturer imagination that the quaint yet unequaled allegory of old John Bunyan still hold over the brains of childhood.

To the tender judgment of those who know the poet, and, knowing, love him, the little story which follows is intrusted.