place on a
fair wooded hill-top Calidore sees the Graces dancing,
and Colin Clout piping merrily. With these goddesses
is a fourth maid; it is to her alone that Colin
pipes:--

Pype, jolly shepheard, pype thou now apace
Unto thy love that made thee low to lout;
Thy love is present there with thee in place;
Thy love is there advaunst to be another Grace.

Of this fourth maid the poet, after sweetly praising
the daughters of sky-ruling Jove, sings in this wise:--

Who can aread what creature mote she bee;
Whether a creature or a goddesse graced
With heavenly gifts from heven first enraced?
But what so sure she was, she worthy was
To be the fourth with those three other placed,
Yet she was certes but a countrey lasse;
Yet she all other countrey lasses farre did passe.

So farre, as doth the daughter of the day
All other lesser lights in light excell;
So farre doth she in beautyfull array
Above all other lasses beare the bell;
Ne lesse in vertue that beseems her well
Doth she exceede the rest of all her race.

The phrase 'country lass' in this rapturous passage has
been taken to signify that she to whom it applied was
of mean origin; but it scarcely bears this
construction. Probably all that is meant is that her
family was not connected with the Court or the Court
circle. She was not high-born; but she was not low-
born. The final sonnets refer to some malicious
reports circulating about him, and to some local
separation between the sonneteer and his mistress.
This separation was certainly ended in the June
following his acceptance--that is, the June of 1594;
for in that month, on St. Barnabas' day, that is, on
the 11th, Spenser was married. This event Spenser
celebrates in the finest, the most perfect of all his
poems, in the most beautiful of all bridal songs--in
his _Epithalamion_. He had many a time sung for
others; he now bade the Muses crown their heads with
garlands and help him his own love's praises to
resound:--

So I unto my selfe alone will sing,
The woods shall to me answer, and my echo ring.

Then, with the sweetest melody and a refinement and
grace incomparable, he sings with a most happy heart of
various matters of the marriage day--of his love's
waking, of the merry music of the minstrels, of her
coming forth in all the pride of her visible
loveliness, of that 'inward beauty of her lively