Areopagus Volume XXXI

Seven short lessons every someday.

Welcome one and all to the thirty first volume of the Areopagus. It was on this day, the 13th of January, that Edmund Spenser died in 1599, one of England's greatest poets. His Faerie Queen, published under the patronage of Elizabeth I, is the closest thing (alongside Milton's Paradise Lost) to an English national epic. Here is one of its many splendid passages:

Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease,
And layes the soul to sleepe in quiet grave?
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.

Melodious! And so, here we go...