While Southey was at Corston, his grandmother died; the old lady with the large, clear, brown, bright eyes, seated in her garden, was no more to be seen, and the Bedminster house, after a brief occupation by Miss Tyler, was sold. Miss Tyler spoke of Bristol society with a disdainful sniff; it was her choice to wander for a while from one genteel watering-place to another. When Williams gave Southey his first summer holidays, he visited his aunt at Weymouth. The hours spent there upon the beach were the most spiritual hours of Southey’s boyhood; he was for the first time in face of the sea—the sea vast, voiceful, and mysterious. Another epoch-making event occurred about the same time; good Mrs. Dolignon, his aunt’s friend, gave him a book—the first which became his very own since that present of the toy-books of Newbery. It was Hoole’s translation of Tasso’s _Gerusalemme Liberata_; in it a world of poetical adventure was opened to the boy. The notes to Tasso made frequent reference to Ariosto; Bull’s Circulating Library at Bath—a Bodleian to Southey—supplied him with the version, also by Hoole, of the _Orlando Furioso_; here was a forest of old romance in which to lose himself. But a greater discovery was to come; searching the notes again, Southey found mention made of Spenser, and certain stanzas of Spenser’s chief poem were quoted. “Was the _Faerie Queene_ on Bull’s shelves?” “Yes,” was the answer; “they had it, but it was in obsolete language, and the young gentleman would not understand it.” The young gentleman, who had already gone through Beaumont and Fletcher, was not daunted; he fell to with the keenest relish, feeling in Spenser the presence of something which was lacking in the monotonous couplets of Hoole, and charming himself unaware with the music of the stanza. Spenser, “not more sweet than pure, and not more pure than wise,” “High-priest of all the Muses’ mysteries,”[2] was henceforth accepted by Southey as his master.