THERE are so many books now published which tell the stories of
the Faery Queen, and tell them well, that you may think I hardly
need have told one here. But few of these books give the poet's
own words, and I have told the story here giving quotations from
the poem in the hope that you will read them and learn from them
to love Spenser's own words. I hope that long after you have
forgotten my words you will remember Spenser's, that they will
remain in your mind as glowing word-pictures, and make you
anxious to read more of the poem from which they are taken.

Spenser has been called the poet's poet,* he might also be called
the painter's poet, for on every page almost we find a word-
picture, rich in color, rich in detail. Each person as he comes
upon the scene is described for us so that we may see him with
our mind's eye. The whole poem blazes with color, it glows and
gleams with the glamor of fairyland. Spenser more than any other
poet has the old Celtic love of beauty, yet so far as we know
there was in him no drop of Celtic blood. He loved neither the
Irishman nor Ireland. To him his life there was an exile, yet
perhaps even in spite of himself he breathed in the land of
fairies and of "little people" something of their magic: his
fingers, unwittingly perhaps, touched the golden and ivory gate
so that he entered in and saw.

*Charles Lamb.

That it is a fairyland and no real world which Spenser opens to
us is the great difference between Chaucer and him. Chaucer
gives us real men and women who love and hate, who sin and
sorrow. He is humorous, he is coarse, and he is real. Spenser