Of these two poets in their various lonelinesses one may perhaps quote those exquisite lines written by one of them of a somewhat differently caused isolation: each one of them too lacked
Not friends for simple glee
Nor yet for higher sympathy.
To his side the fallow-deer
Came and rested without fear;
The eagle, lord of land and sea,
Stooped down to pay him fealty.
. . . . .
He knew the rocks which angels haunt
Upon the mountains visitant;
He hath kenned them taking wing;
And into caves where Faeries sing
He hath entered; and been told
By voices how men lived of old.
Here now and then he was visited, it may be supposed, by old friends. Perhaps that distinguished son of the University of Cambridge, Gabriel Harvey, may for a while have been his guest; he is introduced under his pastoral name of Hobbinol, as present at the poet's house on his return to Ireland. The most memorable of these visits was that already alluded to—that paid to him in 1589 by Sir Walter Raleigh, with whom it will be remembered he had become acquainted some nine years before. Raleigh, too, had received a grant from the same huge forfeited estate, a fragment of which had been given to Spenser. The granting of these, and other shares of the Desmond estates, formed part of a policy then vigorously entertained by the English Government—the colonising of the so lately disordered and still restless districts of Southern Ireland. The recipients were termed 'undertakers;' it was one of their duties to repair the ravages inflicted during the recent tumults and bring the lands committed to them into some state of cultivation and order.
The wars had been followed by a famine. 'Even in the history of Ireland,' writes a recent biographer of Sir Walter Raleigh, 'there are not many scenes more full of horror that those which the historians of that period rapidly sketch when showing us the condition of almost the whole province of Munster in the year 1584, and the years immediately succeeding.'{6}
The claims of his duties as an 'undertaker,' in addition perhaps to certain troubles at court, where his rival Essex was at this time somewhat superseding him in the royal favour,{7} and making a temporary absence not undesirable, brought Raleigh into Cork County in 1589. A full account of this visit and its important results is given us in Colin Clouts Come Home Again, which gives us at the same time a charming picture of the poet's life at Kilcolman. Colin himself, lately returned home from England, tells his brother shepherds, at their urgent request, of his 'passed fortunes.' He begins with Raleigh's visit. One day, he tells them, as he sat
Under the foote of Mole, that mountaine hore,
Keeping my sheepe amongst the cooly shade
Of the greene alders by the Mullaes shore,
a strange shepherd, who styled himself the Shepherd of the Ocean —
Whether allured with my pipes delight,
Whose pleasing sound yshrilled far about,
Or thither led by chaunce, I know not right —