250 CHAUCER. 



equilibrium of thought which springs from clear-sighted 

 understanding, — makes the beauty of the Saxon nature. 



He believes in another world, and conceives of it with- 

 out metaphysical subtleties as something very much 

 after the pattern of this, but infinitely more desirable. 

 Witness the vision of John Bunyan. Once beat it into 

 him that his eternal well-being, as he calls it, depends 

 on certain conditions, that only so will the balance in 

 the ledger of eternity be in his favor, and the man who 

 seemed wholly of this world will give all that he has, 

 even his life, with a superb simplicity and scorn of the 

 theatric, for a chance in the next. Hard to move, his 

 very solidity of nature makes him terrible when once 

 fairly set agoing. He is the man of all others slow to 

 admit the thought of revolution ; but let him once admit 

 it, he will carry it through and make it stick, — a secret 

 hitherto undiscoverable by other races. 



But poetry is not made out of the understanding ; 

 that is not the sort of block out of which you can carve 

 wing-footed Mercuries. The question of common-sense 

 i is always, "What is it good for 1 !" — a question which 

 would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly 

 by the cabbage. The danger of the prosaic type of 

 mind lies in the stolid sense of superiority which blinds 

 it to everything ideal, to the use of anything that does 

 not serve the practical purposes of life. Do we not re- 

 member how the all-observing and all-fathoming Shake- 

 speare has typified this in Bottom the weaver 1 Sur- 

 rounded by all the fairy creations of fancy, he sends 

 one to fetch him the bag of a humble-bee, and can find 

 no better employment for Mustard-seed than to help 

 Cavalero Cobweb scratch his ass's head between the ears. 

 When Titania, queen of that fair ideal world, offers him 

 a feast of beauty, he says he has a good stomach to a 

 pottle of hay ! 



