To pass from the Virgilian view of Nature to that of our earliest English poet, though it brings us nearer our own age in time, is really to recede from it in feeling to a remote and primitive antiquity. No poet ever loved Nature more than Chaucer did; but it was with a simple, unreflective, child-like love. The Morning Star of English Song, as he has been called, man of the world and skilled in affairs, at home in courts and with the great, conversant with the ways of all men, high and low, could turn aside from the gorgeous imagery that filled his poetic vision, from the profusion of mediæval ceremonies and cavalcade, of high processions with soldiers in armor, caparisoned horses and bedizened ladies, from gallant knights with lordly manners, and homely country-people, from sights and stories fetched from many lands,—to dwell tenderly on the plain sights and sounds of external nature, and to sing of them with the transparency and sweetness of a child. It was Nature in her “first intention,” her most obvious aspects, that attracted him. Once, indeed, in the “Assembly of Foules,” he speaks of “that noble Goddesse of Nature.” This, however, is not his usual language, but rather a conventional way of speaking caught from the Latin poets he had read. Again, in a more serious strain, the same poem speaks thus:— “Nature, the vicare of the Almightie Lord;” but it is not on Nature as a great whole, much less as an abstraction, that his thought usually dwells. It is the outer world in its most concrete forms and objects, with which he delights to interweave his poetry—the homely scenes of South England, the oaks and other forest trees, the green meadows, quiet fields, and comfortable farms, as well as the great castles where the nobles dwelt. One associates him with the green lanes and downs of Surrey and Kent, their natural copsewoods and undulating greenery. I know not that the habitual forms of English landscape, those which are most rural and most unchanged, have ever since found a truer poet, one who so brings before the mind the scene and the spirit of it uncolored by any intervention of his own thought or sentiment. And his favorite season—it is the May-time. Of this he is never tired of singing. When there comes a really spring-like day in May, the east wind gone, and the west wind blowing softly, the leaves coming out, and the birds singing, at such a season one feels instinctively this is the Chaucer atmosphere and time. One passage has been cited in a former chapter in which Chaucer speaks of the daisy very lovingly. Other passages might be cited in which he turns again and again to the same flower, proving that it was a favorite with one poet before either Burns or Wordsworth. Let me give one more passage which gives the characteristic landscape of Chaucer and his feeling about it:—