When We Reached The Concord, We Were Forced
To Row Once More In Good Earnest, With Neither Wind Nor Current
In our favor, but by this time the rawness of the day had
disappeared, and we experienced the warmth of
A summer afternoon.
This change in the weather was favorable to our contemplative
mood, and disposed us to dream yet deeper at our oars, while we
floated in imagination farther down the stream of time, as we had
floated down the stream of the Merrimack, to poets of a milder
period than had engaged us in the morning. Chelmsford and
Billerica appeared like old English towns, compared with
Merrimack and Nashua, and many generations of civil poets might
have lived and sung here.
What a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of Ossian,
and that of Chaucer, and even of Shakespeare and Milton, much
more of Dryden, and Pope, and Gray. Our summer of English poetry
like the Greek and Latin before it, seems well advanced toward
its fall, and laden with the fruit and foliage of the season,
with bright autumnal tints, but soon the winter will scatter its
myriad clustering and shading leaves, and leave only a few
desolate and fibrous boughs to sustain the snow and rime, and
creak in the blasts of ages. We cannot escape the impression
that the Muse has stooped a little in her flight, when we come to
the literature of civilized eras. Now first we hear of various
ages and styles of poetry; it is pastoral, and lyric, and
narrative, and didactic; but the poetry of runic monuments is of
one style, and for every age. The bard has in a great measure
lost the dignity and sacredness of his office. Formerly he was
called a _seer_, but now it is thought that one man sees as much
as another. He has no longer the bardic rage, and only conceives
the deed, which he formerly stood ready to perform. Hosts of
warriors earnest for battle could not mistake nor dispense with
the ancient bard. His lays were heard in the pauses of the
fight. There was no danger of his being overlooked by his
contemporaries. But now the hero and the bard are of different
professions. When we come to the pleasant English verse, the
storms have all cleared away and it will never thunder and
lighten more. The poet has come within doors, and exchanged the
forest and crag for the fireside, the hut of the Gael, and
Stonehenge with its circles of stones, for the house of the
Englishman. No hero stands at the door prepared to break forth
into song or heroic action, but a homely Englishman, who
cultivates the art of poetry. We see the comfortable fireside,
and hear the crackling fagots in all the verse.
Notwithstanding the broad humanity of Chaucer, and the many
social and domestic comforts which we meet with in his verse, we
have to narrow our vision somewhat to consider him, as if he
occupied less space in the landscape, and did not stretch over
hill and valley as Ossian does. Yet, seen from the side of
posterity, as the father of English poetry, preceded by a long
silence or confusion in history, unenlivened by any strain of
pure melody, we easily come to reverence him. Passing over the
earlier continental poets, since we are bound to the pleasant
archipelago of English poetry, Chaucer's is the first name after
that misty weather in which Ossian lived, which can detain us
long. Indeed, though he represents so different a culture and
society, he may be regarded as in many respects the Homer of the
English poets. Perhaps he is the youthfullest of them all. We
return to him as to the purest well, the fountain farthest
removed from the highway of desultory life. He is so natural and
cheerful, compared with later poets, that we might almost regard
him as a personification of spring. To the faithful reader his
muse has even given an aspect to his times, and when he is fresh
from perusing him, they seem related to the golden age. It is
still the poetry of youth and life, rather than of thought; and
though the moral vein is obvious and constant, it has not yet
banished the sun and daylight from his verse. The loftiest
strains of the muse are, for the most part, sublimely plaintive,
and not a carol as free as nature's. The content which the sun
shines to celebrate from morning to evening, is unsung. The muse
solaces herself, and is not ravished but consoled. There is a
catastrophe implied, and a tragic element in all our verse, and
less of the lark and morning dews, than of the nightingale and
evening shades. But in Homer and Chaucer there is more of the
innocence and serenity of youth than in the more modern and moral
poets. The Iliad is not Sabbath but morning reading, and men
cling to this old song, because they still have moments of
unbaptized and uncommitted life, which give them an appetite for
more. To the innocent there are neither cherubim nor angels. At
rare intervals we rise above the necessity of virtue into an
unchangeable morning light, in which we have only to live right
on and breathe the ambrosial air. The Iliad represents no creed
nor opinion, and we read it with a rare sense of freedom and
irresponsibility, as if we trod on native ground, and were
autochthones of the soil.
Chaucer had eminently the habits of a literary man and a scholar.
There were never any times so stirring that there were not to be
found some sedentary still. He was surrounded by the din of
arms. The battles of Hallidon Hill and Neville's Cross, and the
still more memorable battles of Cressy and Poictiers, were fought
in his youth; but these did not concern our poet much, Wickliffe
and his reform much more. He regarded himself always as one
privileged to sit and converse with books.
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