on enough to make you a willing and able reader of
verse in the latter school. But if you are to prefer the style of the
antecessors, other conditions must come in. It is, then, not a question
merely whether you see and love in Imogen the ideal of a wife in love with
her husband, or take to the surpassing and inimitable portraiture of the
"lost archangel" in Satan; but whether you feel the sweetness of Imogen's
soul in the music of her expressions--whether you hear the tones of the
Will that not the thunder has quelled, in that voice to which all "the
hollow deep of hell resounded." If you do, assuredly you will perceive in
yourself that these are discernments of a higher cast, and that place you
upon a higher degree when critics on poetry come to be ranked, than when
you had nothing better to say for yourself than that your bosom bled at
the Elegy on an Unfortunate Young Lady, or that you varied with Alexander
to the varying current of the Ode of St Cecilia's Day.

We call Chaucer the Father of our Poetry, or its Morning Star. The
poetical memory of the country stretches up to him, and not beyond. The
commanding impression which he has made upon the minds of his people dates
from his own day. The old poets of England and Scotland constantly and
unanimously acknowledge him for their master. Greatest names, Dunbar,
Douglas, Spenser, Milton, carry on the tradition of his renown and his
reign.

In part he belongs to, and in part he lifts himself out of, his age. The
vernacular poetry of reviving Europe took a strong stamp from one
principal feature in the manners of the times. The wonderful political
institution of Chivalry--turned into a romance in the minds of those in
whose persons the thing itself subsisted--raised up a fanciful adoration
of women into a law of courtly life; or, at the least, of courtly verse,
to which there was nothing answerable in the annals of the old world. For
though the chief and most potent of human passions has never lacked its
place at the side of war in the song that spoke of heroes--though two
beautiful captives, and a runaway wife bestowed by the Goddess of Beauty,
and herself the paragon of beauty to all tongues and ages, have grounded
the _Iliad_--though the Scaean gate, from which Hector began to flee his
inevitable foe, and where that goddess-born foe himself stooped to
destiny, be also remembered for the last parting of a husband and a
wife--though Circe and Calypso have hindered home