In The Saxon Poetry Extant, In The Earliest English, And The Contemporary Scottish Poetry, There Is Less To Remind The Reader Of The Rudeness And Vigor Of Youth, Than Of The Feebleness Of A Declining Age.

It is for the most part translation of imitation merely, with only an occasional and slight tinge of poetry,

Oftentimes the falsehood and exaggeration of fable, without its imagination to redeem it, and we look in vain to find antiquity restored, humanized, and made blithe again by some natural sympathy between it and the present. But Chaucer is fresh and modern still, and no dust settles on his true passages. It lightens along the line, and we are reminded that flowers have bloomed, and birds sung, and hearts beaten in England. Before the earnest gaze of the reader, the rust and moss of time gradually drop off, and the original green life is revealed. He was a homely and domestic man, and did breathe quite as modern men do.

There is no wisdom that can take place of humanity, and we find _that_ in Chaucer. We can expand at last in his breadth, and we think that we could have been that man's acquaintance. He was worthy to be a citizen of England, while Petrarch and Boccacio lived in Italy, and Tell and Tamerlane in Switzerland and in Asia, and Bruce in Scotland, and Wickliffe, and Gower, and Edward the Third, and John of Gaunt, and the Black Prince, were his own countrymen as well as contemporaries; all stout and stirring names.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 397 of 422
Words from 109425 to 109682 of 116321