CHAUCER. 225 



has no true sense of proportion. His genius is his solidity 

 an admirable foundation of national character. He is 

 healthy, in no danger of liver-complaint, with digestive 

 apparatus of amazing force and precision. He is the best 

 farmer and best grazier among men, raises the biggest crops 

 and the fattest cattle, and consumes proportionate quanti 

 ties of both. He settles and sticks like a diluvial deposit 

 on the warm, low-lying levels, physical and moral. He has 

 a prodigious talent, to use our Yankee phrase, of staying 

 put. You cannot move him ; he and rich earth have a 

 natural sympathy of cohesion. Not quarrelsome, but with 

 indefatigable durability of fight in him, sound of stomach, 

 and not too refined in nervous texture, he is capable of 

 indefinitely prolonged punishment, with a singularly obtuse 

 sense of propriety in acknowledging himself beaten. Among 

 all races perhaps none has shown so acute a sense of the 

 side on which its bread is buttered, and so great a repug 

 nance for having fine phrases take the place of the buty- 

 raceous principle. They invented the words &quot; humbug,&quot; 

 &quot;cant,&quot; &quot;sham,&quot; &quot;gag,&quot; &quot; soft-sodder,&quot; &quot;flapdoddle,&quot; and 

 other disenchanting formulas, whereby the devil of falsehood 

 and unreality gets his effectual apage Satana ! 



An imperturbable perception of the real relations of 

 things is the Saxon s leading quality no sense whatever, 

 or at best small, of the ideal in him. He has no notion 

 that two and two ever make five, which is the problem the 

 poet often has to solve. Understanding, that is, equilibrium 

 of mind, intellectual good digestion, this, with unclogged 

 biliary ducts, makes him mentally and physically what we 

 call a very fixed fact ; but you shall not find a poet in a 

 hundred thousand square miles in many prosperous cen 

 turies of such. But one element of incalculable importance 

 we have not mentioned. In this homely nature, the idea 

 of God, and of a simple and direct relation between the 

 All-Father and his children, is deeply-rooted. There, above 

 all, will he have honesty and simplicity ; less than anything 

 else will he have the sacramental wafer that beautiful 

 emblem of our dependence on Him who giveth the daily 



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