lligible world. His flowers and trees and birds have never
bothered themselves with Spinoza. He himself sings more like a bird than
any other poet, because it never occurred to him, as to Goethe, that he
ought to do so. He pours himself out in sincere joy and thankfulness.
When we compare Spenser's imitations of him with the original passages,
we feel that the delight of the later poet was more in the expression
than in the thing itself. Nature, with him, is only to be transfigured
by art. We walk among Chaucer's sights and sounds; we listen to
Spenser's musical reproduction of them. In the same way the pleasure
which Chaucer takes in telling his stories, has, in itself, the effect
of consummate skill, and makes us follow all the windings of his fancy
with sympathetic interest. His best tales run on like one of our inland
rivers, sometimes hastening a little and turning upon themselves in
eddies, that dimple without retarding the current, sometimes loitering
smoothly, while here and there a quiet thought, a tender feeling, a
pleasant image, a golden-hearted verse, opens quietly as a water-lily to
float on the surface without breaking it into ripple.... Chaucer never
shows any signs of effort, and it is a main proof of his excellence that
he can be so inadequately sampled by detached passages, by single lines
taken away from the connection in which they contribute to the general
effect. He has that continuity of thought, that evenly prolonged power,
and that delightful equanimity, which characterize the higher orders of
mind. There is something in him of the disinterestedness that made the
Greeks masters in art. His phrase is never importunate. His simplicity
is that of elegance, not of poverty. The quiet unconcern with which he
says his best things is peculiar to him among English poets, though
Goldsmith, Addison, and Thackeray, have approached it in prose. He
prattles inadvertently away, and all the while, like the princess in the
story, lets fall a pearl at every other word. It is such a piece of
good luck to be natural. It is the good gift which the fairy god-mother
brings to her prime favorites in the cradle. If not genius, it is alone
what makes genius amiable in the arts. If a man have it not he will
never find it; for when it is sought it is gone.

* * * * *

=_Edgar Allen Poe, 1811-1849._= (Manual, p. 510.)

From "The Masque of the Red Death."

=_221._= CHIMING OF THE CLOCK.