SUSSEX 109 



They take us away to the thin air of the future or to the 

 underworld of the past. This one takes us to the old 

 English sweetness and robustness of an estate of large 

 meadows, sound oak trees not too close together, and a 

 noble house within an oak-paled park. A poet and a 

 man lives there, one who recalls those other poets — they 

 are not many — who please us over the gulf of time almost 

 as much by the personal vigour and courage which we 

 know to have been theirs or is suggested by their work, 

 men like Chaucer, Sidney, Ben Jonson, Drayton, Byron, 



William Morris, and among the living and 



and . I think we should miss their poems more 



than some greater men's if they were destroyed. They 

 stand for their time more clearly than the greatest. For 

 example, Chaucer's language, ideas and temper make it 

 impossible for us to read his work, no matter in how 

 remote a study or garden, shut out from time and change, 

 without feeling that he and all those who rode and talked 

 and were young with him are skeletons or less, though 

 Catullus or Milton may be read with no such feeling. 

 Chaucer seems to remind us of what once we were. His 

 seems a golden age. He wrote before Villon had inaugur- 

 ated modern literature with the cry — • 



Mais ou sont les neiges (Tantan P 



before men appear to us to have learned how immense 

 is the world and time. But we, looking back, with the 

 help of this knowledge, see in the work of this man who 

 filled a little nook of time and space with gaiety, some- 

 thing apart from us, an England, a happy island which his 

 verses made. His gaiety bathes the land in the light of a 

 golden age and the freshness of all the May days w^e can 

 never recover. He " led a lusty life in May " : " in his 



