resumed, old
stout John of Gaunt in love, who might utter his passion, uncertain of
requital,

"In groans that thunder love, in sighs of fire;"

but who, most assuredly, did not build himself a forest bower, and
annually retire from court and castle, to spend there a lovesick May.

Of absolutely fanciful creations are, as we have seen, the "Assemblee of
Foules," and the "Complaint of Mars and Venus," which the poet overhears a
fowl singing on St Valentine's Day ere sunrise. "Of the Cuckou and
Nightingale:" the poet, between _waking and sleeping_, hears the bird of
hate and the bird of music dispute against and for love. When the
nightingale takes leave of him, he wakes. "The Court of Love." The poet,
at the age of eighteen, is summoned by Mercury to do his obeisance at the
Court of Love, "a lite before the Mount of Citheree," called further on
Citheron. He is, on this occasion, not asleep at all, but dreams away like
any other poet, with his eyes open, in broad daylight.

In Chaucer thus we find every kind of possible allegory. There is the
thoroughly _creative_ allegory, when thoughts are turned into beings, and
impersonated abstract ideas appear as deities, and as attendants on
deities. This is the unsubstantial allegory, which has, it must be owned,
a different meaning to different climes and times. For example, to the
belief of the old Greeks, Aphrodite and Eros, albeit essentially thoughts,
had flesh that could be touched, wounded even, and veins, in which for
blood ran ichor. In the verses of our old poet and his contemporaries,
Venus and Cupid are as active as they were with Homer and Anacreon; only,
that now their substance has imperceptibly grown attenuate. So that in the
"Assemblee of Foules," for example, these two celestial potentates are
upon an equal footing, for subsistency and reality, with the great goddess
Dame Nature, who seems to be more of modern than of ancient invention, and
with Plesaunce, Arrai, Beautee, Courtesie, Craft, Delite, Gentlenesse, and
others enow, whom the poet found in attendance upon the Love-god and his
mother. With or without belief, this belongs to all the ages of poetry,
from the beginning to the consummation of the world.

Then there is the _disguising_ allegory--for by no other appellation can
it be described--which may be of a substantial kind. For example, the
Black Knight, as we have seen, forlorn in love, builds himself a lodge in
the wild-wood, to which he resorts