before men appear to us to have learned how immense is the world and time. But we, looking back, with the help of this knowledge, see in the work of this man who filled a little nook of time and space with gaiety, something apart from us, an England, a happy island which his verses made. His gaiety bathes the land in the light of a golden age and the freshness of all the May days we can never recover. He “led a lusty life in May”: “in his lust present was all his thought.” And the gaiety is no less in the sorrowful passages than in the joyful; when, for example, he compares the subjection of the fierce, proud Troilus to love, with the whipping of a spirited horse; when he uses the apparent commonplace about age creeping in “always as still as stone” upon fresh youth; when he exclaims to the false Jason-- Have at thee, Jason! now thy horne is blowe; or cries at the fate of Ugolino’s children-- Allas, Fortune! it was greet crueltee Swiche briddes for to putte in swich a cage! Even in Griselda’s piteous cry-- O tendre, O deere, O yonge children myne, there is an intimation that in those words her sorrow is being spent and that, though it will be renewed, it will be broken up by joyfulness many times before her death. For, as Chaucer’s laughter is assuredly never completed by a sigh, so there is something hearty in his tears that hints of laughter before and after. His was a sharp surprising sorrow that came when he was forced to see the suffering of lovely humanity. He is all gaiety; but it has two moods. Sorrow never changes him more than shadow changes a merry brook. In both moods he seems to speak of a day when men had not only not so far outstripped the lark and nightingale as we have done, but had moments when their joy was equal to the lark’s above the grey dew of May dawns. And thus, if we only had to thank Chaucer for the gaiety which is left behind in his poems, as the straw of a long-past harvest clings to the thorns of a narrow lane, we could never be thankful enough. I feel that Chaucer was the equal of those of whom he wrote, as Homer was the equal of Achilles and Odysseus, just as Byron was the peer of the noblest of the Doges and of the ruined Emperor whom he addressed as-- Vain froward child of Empire! say Are all thy playthings snatched away?