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 



