matins around the poet, and the sun shining brightly
through his windows stained with many a figure of poetic legend, and
upon the walls painted in fine colours "both text and gloss, and all
the Romaunt of the Rose"--is not this a picture of Chaucer by his own
hand, on which, one may love to dwell? And just as the poem has begun
with a touch of nature, and at the beginning of its main action has
returned to nature, so through the whole of its course it maintains the
same tone. The sleeper awakened--still of course in his dream--hears
the sound of the horn, and the noise of huntsmen preparing for the
chase. He rises, saddles his horse, and follows to the forest, where
the Emperor Octavian (a favourite character of Carolingian legend, and
pleasantly revived under this aspect by the modern romanticist, Ludwig
Tieck--in Chaucer's poem probably a flattering allegory for the King)
is holding his hunt. The deer having been started, the poet is
watching the course of the hunt, when he is approached by a dog, which
leads him to a solitary spot in a thicket among mighty trees; and here
of a sudden he comes upon a man in black, sitting silently by the side
of a huge oak. How simple and how charming is the device of the
faithful dog acting as a guide into the mournful solitude of the
faithful man! For the knight whom the poet finds thus silent and
alone, is rehearsing to himself a lay, "a manner song," in these
words:--

I have of sorrow so great wone,
That joye get I never none,
Now that I see my lady bright,
Which I have loved with all my might,
Is from me dead, and is agone.
Alas! Death, what aileth thee
That thou should'st not have taken me,
When that thou took'st my lady sweet?
That was so fair, so fresh, so free,
So goode, that men may well see
Of all goodness she had no meet.

Seeing the knight overcome by his grief, and on the point of fainting,
the poet accosts him, and courteously demands his pardon for the
intrusion. Thereupon the disconsolate mourner, touched by this token of
sympathy, breaks out into the tale of his sorrow which forms the real
subject of the poem. It is a lament for the loss of a wife who was
hard to gain (the historical basis of this is unknown, but great
heiresses are usually hard to gain for cadets even of royal houses),
and whom, alas! her husband was to lose so soon after he had gained
her. Nothing could be simpler, and nothing could be more delightful
than th