"and ever on the ground I see thee
stare." He heard little of his neighbours' talk when office work in Thames
Street was over. "Thou goest home to thy own house anon, and also dumb as
any stone thou sittest at another book till fully dazed is thy look, and
livest thus as an heremite, although," he adds slyly, "thy abstinence is
lite," or little. But of this seeming abstraction from the world about him
there is not a trace in Chaucer's verse. We see there how keen his
observation was, how vivid and intense his sympathy with nature and the men
among whom he moved. "Farewell, my book," he cried as spring came after
winter and the lark's song roused him at dawn to spend hours gazing alone
on the daisy whose beauty he sang. But field and stream and flower and
bird, much as he loved them, were less to him than man. No poetry was over
more human than Chaucer's, none ever came more frankly and genially home to
men than his "Canterbury Tales."

It was the continuation and revision of this work which mainly occupied him
during the years from 1384 to 1391. Its best stories, those of the Miller,
the Reeve, the Cook, the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Friar, the Nun,
the Priest, and the Pardoner, are ascribed to this period, as well as the
Prologue. The framework which Chaucer chose--that of a pilgrimage from
London to Canterbury--not only enabled him to string these tales together,
but lent itself admirably to the peculiar characteristics of his poetic
temper, his dramatic versatility and the universality of his sympathy. His
tales cover the whole field of mediaeval poetry; the legend of the priest,
the knightly romance, the wonder-tale of the traveller, the broad humour of
the fabliau, allegory and apologue, all are there. He finds a yet wider
scope for his genius in the persons who tell these stories, the thirty
pilgrims who start in the May morning from the Tabard in Southwark--thirty
distinct figures, representatives of every class of English society from
the noble to the ploughman. We see the "verray perfight gentil knight" in
cassock and coat of mail, with his curly-headed squire beside him, fresh as
the May morning, and behind them the brown-faced yeoman in his coat and
hood of green with a mighty bow in his hand. A group of ecclesiastics light
up for us the mediaeval church--the brawny hunt-loving monk, whose bridle
jingles as loud and clear as the chapel-bell--the wanton friar, first among
the beggars and harpers of the co