When our poet does reappear in London, it is not to tell any story of the war--of its hazards, or of its triumphs. Indeed, it is remarkable that this lissome poet, whose words like bangles shook out all tunes to his step, and who lived in the very heart of the days of Poitiers--when the doughty young Black Prince kindled a martial furor that was like the old crusade craze to follow _Cœur de Lion_ to battle--remarkable, I say, that Chaucer, living on the high tide of war--living, too, in a court where he must have met Froissart, that pet of the Queen, who gloried in giving tongue to his enthusiasm about the deeds of knighthood--wonderful, I say, that Chaucer should not have brought into any of his tales or rhymes the din and the alarums and the seething passions of war. There are indeed glimpses of fluttering pennons and of spear thrusts; maybe, also, purple gouts of blood welling out from his page; but these all have the unreal look of the tourney, to which they mostly attach; he never scores martial scenes with a dagger. For all that Crécy or its smoking artillery had to do with his song, he might have sung a century earlier, or he might have sung a century later. Indeed, he does not seem to us a man of action, notwithstanding his court connection and his somewhile official place;--not even a man of loudly declared public policy, but always the absorbed, introspective, painstaking, quiet observer, to whom Nature in the gross, with its humanities now kindled by wanton appetites, and now lifted by reverence and love (with the everlasting broidery of flowers and trees and sunshine), was always alluring him from things accidental and of the time--though it were time of royal Philip’s ruin, or of a conquest of Aquitaine. Yet withal, this Chaucer is in some sense a man of the world and courtier. The “Boke of the Duchesse” tells us this. And he can weave chaplets for those who have gone through the smoke of battles--though his own inclination may not lead him thither. To a date not very remote from that which belongs to the “Duchesse” must in all probability be assigned that other well-known minor poem of Chaucer’s, called the “Parlament of Foules.”[44] There are stories of his love-lornness in his young days, and of marriage delayed and of marriage made good--coming mostly from those who paint large pictures with few pigments--and which are exceeding hazy and indeterminate of outline: his “Troilus and Cresseide” make us know that he could go through the whole gamut of love, and fawning and teasing and conquest and forgetting, in lively earnest as well as fancy--if need were.