He sitting me beside in that same shade, Provoked me to plaie some pleasant fit; And when he heard the musicke which I made, He found himselfe full greatly pleased at it: Yet, oemuling my pipe, he took in hond My pipe, before that oemuled of many, And played thereon; (for well that skill he cond;) Himself as skilfull in that art as any. He piped, I sung; and, when he sung, I piped. By chaunge of turnes, each making other mery; Neither envying other, nor envied, So piped we, untill we both were weary." That is Spenser's account--a very pretty account--of the time which he spent with Ralegh. It is written in "Colin Clouts Come Home Againe." They had, of course, met before, as young men and soldiers by Smerwick, when Spenser was secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton. But now many years had passed by: they met again, and knew that they were friends. The movement of a leaf is enough to show the direction of a large wind: and a phrase may point the attitude of a friendship between two men. A sentence thus pregnant occurs in Spenser's dedication to his pastoral account of his visit to London. With a whimsical humour, which is characteristic of him, he writes to the right worthy and noble knight, Sir Walter Ralegh, Captain of her Majesties Guard, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and Lieutenant of the County of Cornwall. "SIR, "That you may see that I am not alwaies ydle as yee thinke, though not greatly well occupied, nor altogither undutifull, though not precisely officious, I make you present of this simple Pastorall...." You can see Spenser smile, as he writes, to think of this "strange shepheard's" terrific energy: how Ralegh came upon him when he was oppressed with melancholy and high dreams, which this melancholy did not allow him to express: how intercourse with Ralegh inspired him with new life. He would brood, too, of many things, which the memory of those days stirred up within him. For Ralegh, like Sidney, the friend of Spenser's earliest youth, was a poet as well as a man of action; and though Spenser was a bigger poet than either he was not a bigger man. The poet in Ralegh would draw him in reverence near to Spenser; and then he would break out into denunciation of the inertia which was inclined to creep over Spenser, and hold him in its long tentacles. The dreamer had a certain dependance on others. Yet almost against his will it would be that he submitted to the journey to Court, catching Ralegh's glow of admiration for his work--those three books of the "Faërie Queene," which Gabriel Harvey had told him were rubbish, but which he loved himself. He was ready to believe in their worth, too, though the dreamer could not help smiling at his friend's so restless energy, which could not allow him to sit and dream his life away, but which drove him always on to be up and doing. Ralegh was the Shepherd of the Ocean, and the Ocean (God wot) is--