In endeavoring to point out what seem to be the peculiar characteristics of Chaucer, I think we shall find one of the chief to be this--that he is the first poet who has looked to nature as a motive of conscious emotion. Accordingly, his descriptions are always simple and addressed to the eye rather than to the mind, or to the fancy rather than to the imagination. Very often he is satisfied with giving a list of flowers with no epithet, or one expressive of color or perfume only. Mr. Lowell here read a number of passages from the “Assembly of Fowls” and other poems of Chaucer, with an extract from Spenser. Now I observe that all Chaucer’s epithets are primary, or such as give birth to the feeling; and all Shakspeare’s secondary, or such as the feeling gives birth to. In truth, Shakspeare’s imagination is always dramatic, even in his narrative poems, and it was so abundant that the mere overflow of it has colored the very well-springs of the English language, and especially of English poetry. On Chaucer, nature seems to have always smiled (except in winter, which he cordially hated), and no rumor of man’s fall appears to have reached the trees and birds and flowers. Nature has taken to thinking lately, and a moral jumps up out of a blossom, like a jack-in-a-box. Another characteristic which we find in all the poems where Chaucer speaks in his own person is a sentiment of _seclusion_. He always dreams of walking in a park or a garden walled-in on every side. It is not narrowness but privacy that he delights in, and a certain feeling of generous limitation. In this his poems are the antithesis of Milton’s, which always give a feeling of great spaces. In description it would be hard to find Chaucer’s superior. His style is distinguished always by an energetic simplicity, which is a combination exceedingly rare. It was apparently natural to him. But when he is describing anything that he loves, here is an inexpressible tenderness, as if his eyes filled with tears. His narrative flows on like one of our inland rivers, sometimes hastening a little, and in its eddies seeming to run sunshine; sometimes lingering smoothly, while here and there a beautiful quiet thought, a pure feeling, a golden-hearted verse opens as quietly as a water-lily, and makes no ripple. In modern times the desire for startling expression is so strong that people hardly think a thought is good for anything unless it goes off with a _pop_ like a gingerbeer cork. In Chaucer’s pathetic passages (and they are many), the presence of _pity_ is a thing to be noticed--and the more so as he is the best pathetic story-teller among the English, and, except Dante, among the modern poets. Chaucer, when he comes to the sorrow of his story, seems to croon over the thoughts, and soothe them, and handle them with a pleasant compassionateness, as a child treats a wounded bird which he cannot make up his heart to let go, and yet fears to close his fingers too firmly upon.