common mankind lie buried in sleep--is all the saving partition
that the poet has deigned betwixt the coarse and harsh Real and the
splendid Unreal. As for the poetical working-out--the descriptive
narrative--it is elaborate and full of beauty. The natural scene is
painted with exquisite sensibility to the influences of nature, and with
such determinate strokes as show a conversant eye. For example, the mixed
and illuminated spring-foliage, the

----"levis new
That sprongin out _agen the sonne shene_:
Some _very rede_, and some a _glad light_ grene,"

would seem fresh and vivid from the hand of Coleridge or Tennyson--and the

----"path of _litil brede_,
----that _gretly had not usid be_,
For it _forgrowin was with gras and wede_,"

--which beguiles the foot of the vision-favoured away from the usual beat
of men, leading her into the unvisited sequestration due to the haunting
of an embodied Allegory--might, in its old simplicity, pass for well
invented by whichsoever Priest of Imagination in our day can the best
read, in the Sensible, the symbolized Spiritual and Invisible.

You wonder withal, if Chaucer was the poet, how the spectator was turned
into a spectatress; and you are somewhat concerned at finding an unwilling
word of the judicious Tyrwhitt's, which owns to a doubt on the authorship
of the most beautiful minor poem, admitted into the volume of Chaucer.

Dryden felt the effusion of beauty, and has rendered and enhanced it. One
may question the fitness of a material alteration which he has ventured
upon. The allegory of the old Poem is pure. Dryden has changed the Knights
and Ladies, collectively, into Fairies; for any thing that appears,
indeed, of good human stature. The thought came to him apparently as
making the beauty more beautiful, and possibly as obtaining, to an
otherwise indefinite sort of imaginary beings, a known character and a
recognized hold upon poetical--succeeding to popular--belief. A
contradiction is--that the company of the Leaf have, in emphatic and
chosen terms, been described as INNUMERABLE. The laurel is of such
enormous diffusion, that A HUNDRED persons might repose under it. Yet IT
SHELTERS THEM ALL FROM THE STORM.

It is also singular to us, that the Margarete or Daisy should suffer any
slight from Chaucer, seeing the reverence with which he elsewhere regards
it. It is here, too, no doubt raised into reverence by the observance of
the Fl