ly killed; and he was preparing to sail away
into space. The twenty-first book might have been written at any time
between 1592 and 1595, and its most dismal groans be fairly explicable.
Looking back to his regrets in 1589 for an episode of neglect, he could
wonder at himself--

At middle day my sun seemed under land,
When any little cloud did it obscure.

Had Spenser seen the twenty-first book of _Cynthia_ in 1591, with its
real or unreal blackness of despair, he would not have spoken of Ralegh
as basking in the renewed radiance of happy prospects. So _Cynthia_, as
far as it was ever composed, may be considered one poem, to which the
extant twenty-first book essentially belongs. There is not, therefore,
necessarily any hope, or fear, that the whole exists, or ever existed,
in a perfect shape. Ralegh would nurse the idea for all the years in
which the Queen's withdrawal of the light of her countenance gave him
comparative leisure. The twenty-first book itself would be written with
the direct purpose of softening his mistress's obduracy. The explanation
of its preservation among the Hatfield papers may be that, on the eve of
his departure, forsaken, withered, hopeless, for Guiana, it was
confided, in 1594 or 1595, to Cecil, then a good friend, for seasonable
production to the Queen. Viewed as written either in 1589, or in the
reign of James, much of the twenty-first book is without meaning. Its
tone is plain and significant for the years 1592 to 1595. If traced to
that period, it tells both of the bold coming adventure of 1595,

To kingdoms strange, to lands far-off addressed,

and of the irresistible power of 'her memory' in 1592

To call me back, to leave great honour's thought,
To leave my friends, my fortune, my attempt;
To leave the purpose I so long had sought,
And hold both cares and comforts in contempt.

[Sidenote: _Belphoebe._]

Concurrent testimony in favour of a date for the book later than 1589,
though much prior to 1603, is afforded by the use in it of the name
Belphoebe:

A queen she was to me--no more Belphoebe;
A lion then--no more a milk-white dove;
A prisoner in her breast I could not be;
She did untie the gentle chains of love.

Belphoebe was a word coined apparently by Spenser. To the poem of
_Cynthia_ Spenser had said he owed the idea of the name, implying that
it was of his coinage. It was fashioned, he stated, 'according to
Ralegh's