The numbers flow as fast as spring doth rise.
But here he has thrown into his composition all his power of concentration, of arrangement, of strong and harmonious government over thought and image, over language and measure and rhythm; and the result is unquestionably one of the grandest lyrics in English poetry. We have learned to think the subject unfit for such free poetical treatment; Spenser's age did not.
Of the lady of whom all this was said, and for whom all this was written, the family name has not been thought worth preserving. We know that by her Christian name she was a namesake of the great queen, and of Spenser's mother. She is called a country lass, which may mean anything; and the marriage appears to have been solemnized in Cork, on what was then Midsummer Day, "Barnaby the Bright," the day when "the sun is in his cheerful height," June 11/22, 1594. Except that she survived Spenser, that she married again, and had some legal quarrels with one of her own sons about his lands, we know nothing more about her. Of two of the children whom she brought him, the names have been preserved, and they indicate that in spite of love and poetry, and the charms of Kilcolman, Spenser felt as Englishmen feel in Australia or in India. To call one of them _Sylvanus_, and the other _Peregrine_, reveals to us that Ireland was still to him a "salvage land," and he a pilgrim and stranger in it; as Moses called his firstborn Gershom, a stranger here--"for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land."
In the year after his marriage, he sent over these memorials of it to be published in London, and they were entered at Stationers' Hall in November, 1595. The same year he came over himself, bringing with him the second instalment of the _Faery Queen_, which was entered for publication the following January, 1595/6. Thus the half of the projected work was finished; and finished, as we know from one of the Sonnets (80), before his marriage. After his long "race through Fairy land," he asks leave to rest, and solace himself with his "love's sweet praise;" and then "as a steed refreshed after toil," he will "stoutly that second worke assoyle." The first six books were published together in 1596. He remained most of the year in London, during which _The Four Hymns on Love and Beauty, Earthly and Heavenly_, were published; and also a Dirge (_Daphnaida_) on Douglas Howard, the wife of Arthur Gorges, the spirited narrator of the Island Voyage of Essex and Ralegh, written in 1591; and a "spousal verse" (_Prothalamion_), on the marriage of the two daughters of the Earl of Worcester, late in 1596. But he was only a visitor in London. The _Prothalamion_ contains a final record of his disappointments in England.