y there are not many pages in this poet's works devoid of
lines or passages the music of which cannot escape any ear, however
unaccustomed it may be to his diction and versification. What is the
nature of the art at whose bidding ten monosyllables arrange themselves
into a line of the exquisite cadence of the following:--

And she was fair, as is the rose in May?

Nor would it be easy to find lines surpassing in their melancholy charm
Chaucer's version of the lament of Medea, when deserted by Jason,--a
passage which makes the reader neglectful of the English poet's modest
hint that the letter of the Colchian princess may be found at full
length in Ovid. The lines shall be quoted verbatim, though not
literatim; and perhaps no better example, and none more readily
appreciable by a modern ear, could be given than the fourth of them of
the harmonious effect of Chaucer's usage of SLURRING, referred to
above:--

Why liked thee my yellow hair to see
More than the boundes of mine honesty?
Why liked me thy youth and thy fairness
And of thy tongue the infinite graciousness?
O, had'st thou in thy conquest dead y-bee(n),
Full myckle untruth had there died with thee.

Qualities and powers such as the above, have belonged to poets of very
various times and countries before and after Chaucer. But in addition
to these he most assuredly possessed others, which are not usual among
the poets of our nation, and which, whencesoever they had come to him
personally, had not, before they made their appearance in him, seemed
indigenous to the English soil. It would indeed be easy to
misrepresent the history of English poetry, during the period which
Chaucer's advent may be said to have closed, by ascribing to it a
uniformly solemn and serious, or even dark and gloomy, character. Such
a description would not apply to the poetry of the period before the
Norman Conquest, though, in truth, little room could be left for the
play of fancy or wit in the hammered-out war-song, or in the long-drawn
scriptural paraphrase. Nor was it likely that a contagious gaiety
should find an opportunity of manifesting itself in the course of the
versification of grave historical chronicles, or in the tranquil
objective reproduction of the endless traditions of British legend. Of
the popular songs belonging to the period after the Norman Conquest,
the remains which furnish us with direct or indirect evidence
concerning them hardly enable us