This poem is written in
a tone that had been extremely frequent during
Spenser's youth. Its text is that ancient one 'Vanity
of Vanities; all is Vanity'--a very obvious text in all
ages, but perhaps especially so, as has been hinted, in
the sixteenth century, and one very frequently adopted
at that time. This text is treated in a manner
characteristic of the age. It is exemplified by a
series of visions. The poet represents himself as
seeing at Verulam an apparition of a woman weeping over
the decay of that ancient town. This woman stands for
the town itself. Of its whilome glories, she says,
after a vain recounting of them,

They all are gone and with them is gone,
Ne ought to me remaines, but to lament
My long decay.

No one, she continues, weeps with her, no one remembers
her,

Save one that maugre fortunes injurie
And times decay, and enuies cruell tort
Hath writ my record in true seeming sort.

Cambden the nourice of antiquitie,
And lanterne unto late succeeding age,
To see the light of simple veritie
Buried in ruines, through the great outrage
Of her owne people, led with warlike rage,
Cambden, though time all moniments obscure,
Yet thy just labours ever shall endure.

Then she rebukes herself for these selfish moanings by
calling to mind how far from solitary she is in her
desolation. She recalls to mind the great ones of the
land who have lately fallen--Leicester, and Warwick,
and Sidney--and wonders no longer at her own ruin. Is
not _Transit Gloria_ the lesson taught everywhere?
Then other visions and emblems of instability are seen,
some of them not darkly suggesting that what passes
away from earth and apparently ends may perhaps be
glorified elsewhere. The second of these collected
poems--_The Teares of the Muses_--dedicated, as we have
seen, to one of the poet's fair cousins, the Lady
Strange, deplores the general intellectual condition of
the time. It is doubtful whether Spenser fully
conceived what a brilliant literary age was beginning
about the year 1590. Perhaps his long absence in
Ireland, the death of Sidney who was the great hope of
England Spenser knew, the ecclesiastical controversies
raging when he revisited England, may partly account
for his despondent tone with reference to literature.
He introduces each Muse weeping for the neglect and
contempt suffered by her respective province. He who
describes t