and power became a fairyland of youth, springtime, and romantic
achievement.

Wise and gallant courtiers, like Sidney, Leicester, and Raleigh, gathered
about the queen, and formed a new chivalry devoted to deeds of adventure
and exploits of mind in her honor. The spirit of the old sea-kings lived
again in Drake and his bold buccaneers, who swept the proud Spaniards from
the seas. With the defeat of the Invincible Armada, the greatest naval
expedition of modern times, the fear of Spanish and Catholic domination
rolled away. The whole land was saturated with an unexpressed poetry, and
the imagination of young and old was so fired with patriotism and noble
endeavor that nothing seemed impossible. Add to this intense delight in
life, with all its mystery, beauty, and power, the keen zest for learning
which filled the air that men breathed, and it is easy to understand that
the time was ripe for a new and brilliant epoch in literature. First among
the poetic geniuses of the Elizabethan period came Edmund Spenser with his
_Faerie Queene_, the allegory of an ideal chivalry.

This poem is one of the fruits of that intellectual awakening which first
fertilized Italian thought in the twelfth century, and, slowly spreading
over Europe, made its way into England in the fifteenth century. The mighty
impulse of this New Learning culminated during the reign of the Virgin
Queen in a profound quickening of the national consciousness, and in
arousing an intense curiosity to know and to imitate the rich treasures of
the classics and romance. Its first phase was the _classical revival_. The
tyrannous authority of ecclesiasticism had long since been broken; a
general reaction from Christian asceticism had set in; and by the side of
the ceremonies of the church had been introduced a semi-pagan religion of
art--the worship of moral and sensuous beauty. Illiteracy was no longer the
style at court. Elizabeth herself set the example in the study of Greek.