Perhaps another charm of these ballads is that nobody made them. They seem to have come up like violets, and we have only to thank God for them. And we imply a sort of fondness when we call them “old.” It is an epithet we give endearingly and not as supposing any decrepitude or senescence in them. Like all true poetry, they are not only young themselves, but the renewers of youth in us; they do not lose, but accumulate, strength and life. A true poem gets a part of its inspiring force from each generation of men. The great stream of Homer rolls down to us out of the past, swollen with the tributary delight and admiration of the ages. The next generation will find Shakspeare fuller of meaning and energy by the addition of our enthusiasm. Sir Philip Sidney’s admiration is part of the breath that sounds through the trumpet of “Chevy Chase.” That is no empty gift with which we invest a poem when we bestow on it our own youth, and it is no small debt we owe the true poem that it preserves for us some youth to bestow. LECTURE V CHAUCER (_Tuesday Evening, January 23, 1855_) V It is always a piece of good fortune to be the earliest acknowledged poet of any country. We prize the first poems as we do snowdrops, not only for their own intrinsic beauty, but even more for that force of heart and instinct of sunshine in them which brings them up, where grass is brown and trees are bare, the outposts and forlorn hopes of spring. There never comes anything again like a _first_ sensation, and those who love Chaucer, though they may have learned late to do it, cannot help imaginatively antedating their delight, and giving him that place in the calendar of their personal experience which belongs to him in the order of our poetic history. And the feeling is a true one, for although intensity be the great characteristic of all genius, and the power of the poet is measured by his ability to renew the charm of freshness in what is outworn and habitual, yet there is something in Chaucer which gives him a personal property in the epithet “vernal,” and makes him seem always to go hand in hand with May.