scribes the scene of adventure--in some, the desire of solace in field
and wood leads him into the scene. Fifthly, a truly magnanimous
indifference to the flight of time and to the cost of parchment, expressed
in the dilatation of a slender matter through an infinite series of
verses. You wonder at the facility of writing in the infancy of art. It
seems to resemble the exuberant, untiring activity of children, prompted
by a vital delight which overflows into the readiest utterance; and, in
proportion to its display, achieving the less that is referable to any
purpose of enduring use. Even the admired and elaborately-written
_Troilus_ and _Creseide_ is a great specimen. The action is nearly null;
the discoursing of the persons and of the poet endless. It is not, then,
simply the facility of the eight-syllabled couplet, as in that
interminable _Chaucer's Dreme_, that betrays; there is a dogged purpose of
going on for ever.

Of the poems expressly of Love, are, "The Romaunt of the Rose--Troilus and
Creseide--The Legende of Goode Women--The Assemblee of Foules--Of Queen
Annelida and False Arcita--The Complaint of the Blacke Knight--The
Complaint of Mars and Venus--Of the Cuckou and the Nightingale--The Court
of Love--Chaucer's Dreme--The Flour and the Leaf--The First Book of the
House of Fame"--and, if you choose, the "Boke of the Duchess," which is
John of Gaunt's mourning for his lost wife. There must be something like
thirty thousand verses, long, short, in couplets or stanzas, which may be
said to be dedicated to LOVE!

And of them all, only the four following Poems tread the plain
ground--have their footing upon the same earth that we walk--Troilus and
Creseide, The Legende of Goode Women, Queen Annelida and False Arcita,
the Complaint of the Blacke Knight. We grant them for human and real,
notwithstanding that most of the persons are of a very romantic and
apocryphal stamp--because they are not presented in dreams or visions, and
are not allegorical creations of beings out of the air, Impersonations of
Ideas. They are offered as men and women, downright flesh and blood, and
so are to be understood. Nevertheless even here, when Chaucer is nearest
home, taking his subject in his own day, and putting his own friend and
patron in verse, there is a trick of the riddling faculty, since the
Blacke Knight lodging, during the love-month of May, in the greenwood, and
bemoaning all day long his hard love-hap, represents, it is p