yet they cannot
be included among those matter-of-course notices of morning and
evening, sunrise and sunset, to which so many poets have accustomed us
since (be it said with reverence) Homer himself. In Chaucer these
passages make his page "as fresh as is the month of May." When he went
forth on these April and May mornings, it was not solely with the
intent of composing a roundelay or a marguerite; but we may be well
assured, he allowed the song of the little birds, the perfume of the
flowers, and the fresh verdure of the English landscape, to sink into
his very soul. For nowhere does he seem, and nowhere could he have
been, more open to the influence which he received into himself, and
which in his turn he exercised, and exercises, upon others, than when
he was in fresh contact with nature. In this influence lies the secret
of his genius; in his poetry there is LIFE.

CHAPTER 4. EPILOGUE.

The legacy which Chaucer left to our literature was to fructify in the
hands of a long succession of heirs; and it may be said, with little
fear of contradiction, that at no time has his fame been fresher and
his influence upon our poets--and upon our painters as well as our
poets--more perceptible than at the present day. When Gower first put
forth his "Confessio Amantis," we may assume that Chaucer's poetical
labours, of the fame of which his brother-poet declared the land to be
full, had not yet been crowned by his last and greatest work. As a
poet, therefore, Gower in one sense owes less to Chaucer than did many
of their successors; though, on the other hand it may be said with
truth that to Chaucer is due the fact, that Gower (whose earlier
productions were in French and in Latin) ever became a poet at all.
The "Confessio Amantis" is no book for all times like the "Canterbury
Tales"; but the conjoined names of Chaucer and Gower added strength to
one another in the eyes of the generations ensuing, little anxious as
these generations were to distinguish which of the pair was really the
first to it "garnish our English rude" with the flowers of a new poetic
diction and art of verse.

The Lancaster period of our history had its days of national glory as
well as of national humiliation, and indisputably, as a whole, advanced
the growth of the nation towards political manhood. But it brought
with it no golden summer to fulfil the promises of the spring-tide of
our modern poetical literature. The two poets whose names