Brood sombrous clouds above a midnight sea; Rude, rifted rocks rise round the final shore Of life’s wide world. Through the thick mist that o’er The scene spreads sadness, lo! all silently Glides a lone, wearied, shattered bark along; Sun, moon and stars are darkened unto him, Its aged voyager. His eyesight dim, Nor joy nor pleasure can to him belong— Ferried fast on by many drooping hours, Nears he the leaden stream’s wide mouth, at last, Whose waters wildly roar as run they past Into eternity’s vast flood. All powers Fail now to him. With numerous sorrows rife, Enters he then the haven of immortal life. * * * * * =CHAUCER AND HIS TIMES.= =BY THOMAS B. SHAW.= We consider the age of Chaucer as the true starting-point of the English literature properly so called. In Italy letters appear to have revived after the long and gloomy period characterized by the somewhat false term of “the dark ages,” with astonishing rapidity. Like germs and seeds of plants which have lain for centuries buried deep in the unfruitful bowels of the earth, and suddenly brought up by some convulsion of nature to the surface, the intellect of Italy burst forth, in the fourteenth century, into a tropical luxuriance, putting out its fairest flowers of poetry, and its solidest and most beautiful fruits of wisdom and of wit. Dante died seven years before, and Petrarch and Boccaccio about fifty years after, the birth of Chaucer, who thus was exposed to the strongest and directest influence of the genius of these great men. How great that influence was, we shall presently see. The great causes, then, which modified and directed the genius of Chaucer were—first, the new Italian poetry, which then suddenly burst forth upon the world, like Pallas from the brain of Jupiter, perfect and consummate in its virgin strength and beauty; second, the now decaying Romanz or Provençal poetry; and third, the doctrines of the Reformation, which were beginning, obscurely but irresistibly, to agitate the minds of men; a movement which took its origin, as do all great and permanent revolutions, in the lower depths of the popular heart, heaving gradually onward, like the tremendous ground-swell of the equator, until it burst with resistless strength upon the Romish Church in Germany and in England, sweeping all before it. Wickliffe, who was born in 1324, only four years before Chaucer, had undoubtedly communicated to the poet many of his bold doctrines: the father of our poetry and the father of our reformed religion were both attached to the party of the celebrated John of Gaunt, and were both honored with the friendship and protection of that powerful prince: Chaucer, indeed, was the kinsman of the earl,