them into his tomb.

[Sidenote: CHARACTER]

In character Spenser was unfitted either for the intrigues among
Elizabeth's favorites or for the more desperate scenes amid which
his Lot was cast. Unlike his friend Raleigh, who was a man of
action, Spenser was essentially a dreamer, and except in Cambridge
he seems never to have felt at home. His criticism of the age as
barren and hopeless, and the melancholy of the greater part of his
work, indicate that for him, at least, the great Elizabethan times
were "out of joint." The world, which thinks of Spenser as a great
poet, has forgotten that he thought of himself as a disappointed
man.

WORKS OF SPENSER. The poems of Spenser may be conveniently grouped in three
classes. In the first are the pastorals of _The Shepherd's Calendar_,
in which he reflects some of the poetical fashions of his age. In the
second are the allegories of _The Faery Queen_, in which he pictures
the state of England as a struggle between good and evil. In the third
class are his occasional poems of friendship and love, such as the
_Amoretti_. All his works are alike musical, and all remote from
ordinary life, like the eerie music of a wind harp.

[Sidenote: SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR]

_The Shepherd's Calendar_ (1579) is famous as the poem which announced
that a successor to Chaucer had at last appeared in England. It is an
amateurish work in which Spenser tried various meters; and to analyze it is
to discover two discordant elements, which we may call fashionable poetry