ie Queen" was received with a
burst of general welcome. It became "the delight of every accomplished
gentleman, the model of every poet, the solace of every soldier." The
poem expressed indeed the very life of the time. It was with a true
poetic instinct that Spenser fell back for the framework of his story on
the faery world of Celtic romance, whose wonder and mystery had in fact
become the truest picture of the wonder and mystery of the world around
him. In the age of Cortes and of Raleigh dreamland had ceased to be
dreamland, and no marvel or adventure that befell lady or knight was
stranger than the tales which weather-beaten mariners from the Southern
Seas were telling every day to grave merchants upon 'Change. The very
incongruities of the story of Arthur and his knighthood, strangely as it
had been built up out of the rival efforts of bard and jongleur and
priest, made it the fittest vehicle for the expression of the world of
incongruous feeling which we call the Renascence. To modern eyes perhaps
there is something grotesque in the strange medley of figures that crowd
the canvas of the "Faerie Queen," in its fauns dancing on the sward
where knights have hurtled together, in its alternation of the
salvage-men from the New World with the satyrs of classic mythology, in
the giants, dwarfs, and monsters of popular fancy who jostle with the
nymphs of Greek legend and the damosels of mediaeval romance. But,
strange as the medley is, it reflects truly enough the stranger medley
of warring ideals and irreconcileable impulses which made up the life of
Spenser's contemporaries. It was not in the "Faerie Queen" only, but in
the world which it pourtrayed, that the religious mysticism of the
Middle Ages stood face to face with the intellectual freedom of the
Revival of Letters, that asceticism and self-denial cast their spell on
imaginations glowing with the sense of varied and inexhaustible
existence, that the dreamy and poetic refinement of feeling which
expressed itself in the fanciful unrealities of chivalry co-existed
with the rough practical energy that sprang from an awakening sense of
human power, or the lawless extravagance of an idealized friendship and
love lived side by side with the moral sternness and elevation which
England was drawing from the Reformation and the Bible.

But strangely contrasted as are the elements of the poem, they are
harmonized by the calmness and serenity which is the note of the "Faerie