204 Rese and Progress of Enghsh Poetry. 
From heaven to earth, and as imagination _ 
Bodies forth, the forms of things unknown, 
The poet’s eye turns them to shape, 
And gives to airy nothing 
A local habitation and a name.” 
In the limited space allotted to us, we cannot bring to the 
minds of our readers what was the marvellous effects of 
poetic fancy amongst ancient nations. We will, therefore, 
content ourselves by tracing its home influence, amongst 
ourselves, and briefly to describe it by turning to the subject 
under review. It isa matter of no small regret, that we 
are met with, at the very onset, by the difficulty of appre-. 
ciating that which so deeply animated our Saxon ancestors 
—namely, the metrical nature of their poetry. It might 
‘be irksome, and certainly wearisome, to our readers, to 
wade with us through mists of uncertain—nay, almost 
mythical—romance. Therefore, we will pass over that 
period in our subject, which elapsed from the date of 
the Saxon Alfred, in 827, to that of the third Edward, 
in 1327, 
At this period, we shall discover that literature and re- 
finement were making gigantic strides in Europe, and that 
the literature of England was not long in following the 
exemplar of Italy; and that while Dante, Petrarch, and 
Boccaccio gilded the horizon of Italian literature, and re- 
vived the Greek style of poetical composition in Italy, 
they were soon’ followed in their onward course by our 
parent Bard, Chaucer. It is not difficult to imagine, that 
in a Court possessed of so much heroism and gallantry, as 
this most indisputably was, that the Muse would not le 
unneglected. Nor did she, for this reign gave birth to 
Chaucer, the parent bard of our land, and the brightest 
ornament of Edward’s Court. 
With Chaucer, we must necessarily, from the circum- — 
stances we have stated, date the commencement of 
modern poetry in Britain. It must, however, not be 
neglected, that Chaucer had much to struggle with on 
the score of language. The extirpation almost of Anglo- 
Saxon, by William of Normandy, and the adoption, at all 
events, in high places, of the Norman in its place, obliged 
Chaucer to form, if not to create,a new language of his 
own—a fact which must ever be borne in mind, when we, 
at this lapse of centuries, study the writings of ition our 
earliest poet. 
That Chaucer was not only a deep thinker, but a ‘deep . 
