He at first sought for that remoteness, which
is implied in an escape from the realism of daily life, in the
pastoral,--a kind of writing which, oddly enough, from its original
intention as a protest in favor of naturalness, and of human as opposed
to heroic sentiments, had degenerated into the most artificial of
abstractions. But he was soon convinced of his error, and was not long in
choosing between an unreality which pretended to be real and those
everlasting realities of the mind which seem unreal only because they lie
beyond the horizon of the every-day world and become visible only when
the mirage of fantasy lifts them up and hangs them in an ideal
atmosphere. As in the old fairy-tales, the task which the age imposes on
its poet is to weave its straw into a golden tissue; and when every
device has failed, in comes the witch Imagination, and with a touch the
miracle is achieved, simple as miracles always are after they are
wrought.
Spenser, like Chaucer a Londoner, was born in 1553.[268] Nothing is known
of his parents, except that the name of his mother was Elizabeth; but he
was of gentle birth, as he more than once informs us, with the natural
satisfaction of a poor man of genius at a time when the business talent
of the middle class was opening to it the door of prosperous preferment.
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