June Superiority of Chaucer to VirgiL 173 



their pages through the forest-leaves, and every thing 

 around us might illustrate their sylvan imagery. So 

 when June came I seldom went out without some old 

 Idyllist in my pocket, and sometimes Alexis read with 

 me, and often I read alone. 



One general result of these readings remains with 

 me, and that is a strong sense of the inferiority of the 

 classical writers in the passion for natural beauty, I 

 will not say to the moderns, who have made a trade 

 of this passion, just as landscape-painters do, but to 

 the poets of the early renaissance, who wrote simply 

 from the heart, and had no idea of making poetical 

 capital from a business-like observation of Nature. 

 There is not the slightest comparison, for example, 

 between Virgil and Chaucer with respect to wealth of 

 landscape description, either in quantity or passion, 

 Chaucer is so much the more opulent and powerful , 

 poet of the two in every thing that relates to external 

 Nature. And yet when I mention Virgil, I mention 

 a poet highly distinguished amongst the ancients for 

 this very delight in Nature ; a poet who certainly did 

 love sylvan things with a rare degree of affection, and 

 that not simply for his own physical enjoyment of 

 pleasant shade or thirst-assuaging fountain, or fruit 

 delicious in the mouth, but for their own beauty out- 

 side of human needs. But how laconically he expresses 

 this feeling ! how little he dwells upon it ! A few 

 neatly-ordered words suffice; the poet thinks he has 

 said all that is to be said, or need be, and there is an 

 end. Chaucer, on the other hand, whenever he begins 



