he blushingly beholds her lover
riding past in triumph:

So like a man of armes and a knight
He was to see, filled full of high prowess,
For both he had a body, and a might
To do that thing, as well as hardiness;
And eke to see him in his gear him dress,
So fresh, so young, so wieldly seemed he,
It truly was a heaven him for to see.

His helm was hewn about in twenty places,
That by a tissue hung his back behind,
His shield was dashed with strokes of swords and maces
In which men mighte many an arrow find
That pierced had the horn and nerve and rind;
And aye the people cried: "Here comes our joy,
And, next his brother, holder up of Troy."

Even in the very "Book of the Duchess," the widowed lover describes the
maiden charms of his lost wife with so lively a freshness as almost to
make one forget that it is a LOST wife whose praises are being recorded.

The vivacity and joyousness of Chaucer's poetic temperament, however,
show themselves in various other ways besides his favourite manner of
treating a favourite theme. They enhance the spirit of his passages of
dialogue, and add force and freshness to his passages of description.
They make him amusingly impatient of epical lengths, abrupt in his
transitions, and anxious, with an anxiety usually manifested by readers
rather than by writers, to come to the point, "to the great effect," as
he is wont to call it. "Men," he says, "may overlade a ship or barge,
and therefore I will skip at once to the effect, and let all the rest
slip." And he unconsciously suggests a striking difference between
himself and the great Elizabethan epic poet who owes so much to him,
when he declines to make as long a tale of the chaff or of the straw as
of the corn, and to describe all the details of a marriage-feast
seriatim:

The fruit of every tale is for to say:
They eat and drink, and dance and sing and play.

This may be the fruit; but epic poets, from Homer downwards, have been
generally in the habit of not neglecting the foliage. Spenser in
particular has that impartial copiousness which we think it our duty to
admire in the Ionic epos, but which, if the truth were told, has
prevented generations of Englishmen from acquiring an intimate personal
acquaintance with the "Fairy Queen." With Chaucer the danger certainly
rather lay in an opposite direction. Most assuredly he can tell a
story with admirable point and precision, when he wishes to do