enser knight-errantry--grant him
dragons, and enchanters, and enchanted gardens, satyrs, and the goddess
Night on her chariot--grant him love as the single purpose of human
life--a faery power, leading with a faery band his faery world! But while
you accept this Poem as the lawful consummation and ending of that
fabulous intellectual system or dream which had subsisted with authority
for centuries, it is wonderful to see how, in the very day of Spenser, the
STAGE recovers humanity and nature to poetry--recalls poetry to nature and
humanity! Shakspeare and Spenser, what contemporaries! The world that
_is_, and the world that _is not_, twinned in time and in power!

This exaggeration of an immense natural power, Love--making, one might
almost say, man's worship of woman the great religion of the universe, and
which was the "amabilis insania" of the new poetry--long exercised an
unlimited monarchy in the poetical mind of the reasonable Chaucer. See the
longest and most desperate of his Translations--which Tyrwhitt supposes
him to have completed, though we have only two fragments--seven thousand
verses in place of twenty-two thousand--the "ROMAUNT OF THE ROSE,"
otherwise entitled the "Art of Love," "wherein are shewed the helps and
furtherances, as also the lets and impediments, that lovers have in their
suits." Then comes the work upon which Sir Philip Sydney seems to rest the
right of Chaucer to the renown of an excellent poet having the insight of
his art--the five long books which celebrate the type of all true lovers,
Troilus, and of all false traitresses, Creseide. Then there is "The
Legende of GOODE Women," the loving heroines, fabulous and historical, of
Lempriere's dictionary. The first name is decisive upon the signification
of "_goode_"--Cleopatras, Queene of Egypt--Tisbe of Babylon--Dido, Queene
of Carthage--Hipsiphile and Medea, betrayed both by the same "root of
false lovers, Duk Jason"--Lucrece of Rome--Ariadne of
Athens--Philomen--Phillis--Hypermnestra.

The "Assemblee of Foules" is all for love and allegory. Chaucer has been
reading Scipio's dream. Whereon he himself dreams that "Affrican" comes to
him, and carries him away into a sort of Love's Paradise. There were trees
with leaves "grene as emeraude," a garden full of "blossomed bowis,"
running waters in which small fishes light, with red fins and
silver-bright scales, dart to and fro, flowers of all tinctures, all
manner of live creatures, and a concert