English poetry was now nearly five hundred years old. In its creation immense demands had been made upon the language, and many characteristic beauties of poetic style might well have been supposed to have been now explored beyond further possibilities. When Chaucer wrote, the inspiration as of divinely wise and happy childhood could shine through the most ingenuous of phrases, and the plainest statement was touched by magic for ever in this playground of poetry’s infancy. “O yonge fresshe folkes,” he exclaims, or “Now shippes sailinge in the sea,” or “A nightingale, upon a cedre grene,” or “Ther sprang the violete all newe,” and we have with every word the enchanted discovery of poetry. Thereafter a poet might score a great effect now and again by placing some such utter simplicity in the midst of subtler or more elaborate statement, but it could hardly again be used as a customary manner. What was then and has ever since remained triumphantly original in Chaucer could but become commonplace on repetition. His way of saying delightedly that the flowers were fresh and the birds were glad and that apples were sweet, and saying these things just as simply as that, stands beside his humorous invention of character as one of the two chief glories of his poetry, but it was not a case of his faintly suggesting a poetic possibility that could be elaborated by his successors. He took the obvious and without embroidering it with a single word made it into poetry of everlasting freshness, but he did this once and for all, and poets after him would have to add some touch of revelation of their own before they could make good their claim. Chaucer could say that flowers were fresh and leave it at that, giving us a perfect image of spring, but even two hundred years later, in what now seems to us to have been still the dawn of English poetry, Shakespeare had to make his impression with a far more complex image-- daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty. By the time that Tennyson began to write, Shakespeare’s necessity was even plainer. The thousand simple circumstances of nature and humanity were still an inevitable part of the poet’s content matter. In the course of a lifework of artistic creation he could not but want to say a dozen times that the grass was green and the sky blue, the water clear and love uncertain, and it is merely pointless to forbid him these things because they have been said before. But apart from that allowance of an occasional _cliché_, admitted because of some virtue as contrast, as for example when Tennyson says-- On one side lay the ocean, and on one Lay a great water, and the moon was full ... he had to say these things with just as much originality of phrase as would compel attention, and yet with not one word beyond this, or one word too heavily weighted, lest he should be accused of inflation, which is the death of poetry.