228 CHAUCER. 



nate springtide seems to lift the hair upon my forehead. 

 If here be not the largior ether, the serene and motionless 

 atmosphere of classical antiquity, we find at least the 

 seclusum nemus, the domos placidas, and the oubliance, 

 as Froissart so sweetly calls it, that persuade us we are 

 in an Elysium none the less sweet that it appeals to our 

 more purely human, one might almost say domestic, sym- 

 pathies. We may say of Chaucer's muse, as Overbury of 

 his milkmaid, " her breath is her own, which scents all 

 the year long of June like a new-made haycock." The 

 most hardened roue of literature can scarce confront these 

 simple and winning graces without feeling somewhat of 

 the unworn sentiment of his youth revive in him. Mod- 

 ern imaginative literature has become so self-conscious, 

 and therefore so melancholy, that Art, which should be 

 " the world's sweet inn," whither we repair for refresh- 

 ment and repose, has become rather a watering-place, 

 where one's own private touch of the liver-complaint is 

 exasperated by the affluence of other sufferers whose talk 

 is a narrative of morbid symptoms. Poets have forgot- 

 ten that the first lesson of literature, no less than of life, 

 is the learning how to burn your own smoke ; that the 

 way to be original is to be healthy ; that the fresh color, 

 so delightful in all good writing, is won by escaping from 

 the fixed air of self into the brisk atmosphere of universal 

 sentiments ; and that to make the common marvellous, 

 as if it were a revelation, is the test of genius. It is good 

 to retreat now and then beyond earshot of the introspec- 

 tive confidences of modern literature, and to lose our- 

 selves in the gracious worldliness of Chaucer. Here was 

 a healthy and hearty man, so genuine that he need not 

 ask whether he were genuine or no, so sincere as quite to 

 forget his own sincerity, so truly pious that he could be 

 happy in the best world that God chose to make, so hu- 

 mane that he loved even the foibles of his kind. Here 



