ient Greece.

With what glad and light ritual, the Athenians, in the first years after
the war of the Seven Chiefs against Thebes, did homage to their king and
queen of the May, we do not remember to have seen distinctly described. At
this day the young folk of old Hellas parade the streets, shouting the
classical [Greek: chelidonisma], or song of the swallow, on the 1st of
March. The Romans held their Floralia from the 28th of April to the 1st of
May, danced and sang, and had games, and crowned themselves with garlands
and with flowers. Nevertheless, you instinctively feel that the singularly
graceful picture of Emelie, called up from slumber by the dawning May
morning, and proceeding to pluck in the royal garden the dew-fresh and
bright materials of her own coronal, owes nothing to the lore of books,
but is breathingly imaged from some gracious original of our own good
fourteenth century. You remain assured, that the trustworthy poet records
his own proper love-experience in adjusting the occasion that is to vivify
with a new passion the dolorous prison of the two Thebans, and turn the
sworn brothers-in-arms into rivals at deadly feud with each other. That
rougher age of the world--rude the day was not that produced and cherished
Chaucer--had this virtue, that the grown-up men and women were still, by a
part of their heart, children. The welcoming-in of the May is described by
the old poets in different countries of Europe as a passion--seizing upon
young and old, high and low. All were for the hour children--children of
nature. When, therefore, that love at first sight, which immediately
becomes a destiny to the two kinsmen, governing their whole after-life, is
in this manner attached by our poet to the visit made upon this occasion
by Emelie to the garden which their tower overlooks, the reader is
entitled to understand that the poet does for him the very best thing any
poet can do, that he infuses into his poetical dream his own pulsating
life-blood.

The immense joy and universal jubilee of nature, called out by the annual
renewing of warmth, light, life, and beauty, and the share and the
sympathy of man in the diffusive and exuberant benediction, fix themselves
and take form in stated and ordered celebrations all the world over. It
seems hard to deny to any nation the rejoicing on the return of summer.
All have it. Yet certainly Chaucer paints from his own experience, and not
from erudition. The poem of "The Cuck