He knew by nature every step to trace
Of the equinoctial in his native place,
And, when fifteen degrees it had ascended,
Then crew he so as might not be amended.
His comb was redder than the fine corall,
Embattled as it were a castle-wall;
His bill was black, and like the jet it shone ;
Like azure were his legs and toes each one;
His nails were white as lilies in the grass,
And like the burnèd gold his color was."

JOHN.

What gusto! If he had been painting Arthur or Charlemagne, he would not have selected his colors with more care. Without pulling out a feather from his hero's cockhood, he contrives to give him a human interest. How admirable is the little humorous thrust at the astronomers, too, in restricting Sir Chaunticlere's knowledge of the heavenly motions to his own village!

PHILIP.

Yes, Chaucer has the true poet's heart. One thing is as precious to him in point of beauty as another. He would have described his lady's cheek by the same flower to which he has here likened the toes of Chaunticlere. To go on with our story.

"This gentle cock had in his governance
Seven wifely hens to do him all pleasaunce,
Of whom the fairest-colored in the throat
Was known as the fair damsel Partelote;

Courteous she was, discreet and debonair,
Companionable, and bore herself so fair,
Sithence the hour she was a seven-night old,
That truly she the royal heart did hold
Of Chaunticlere bound fast in every limb:
He loved her so that it was well with him:
But such a joy it was to hear them sing,

When that the bright sun in the east 'gan spring,
In sweet accord!"

Chaunticlere, one morning, awakens his fair wife Partelote by a dreadful groaning; and, on her asking the cause, informs her that it must have

been the effect of a bad dream he had been haunted by.

"I dreamed, that, as I roamèd up and down,
Within our yard, I there beheld a beast,
Like to a hound, that would have made arrest
Upon my body, and have had me dead.
His color 'twixt a yellow was and red,

And tippèd was his tail and both his ears

With black, unlike the remnant of his hairs.

His snout was small, and glowing were his eyes:
Still, for his look, the heart within me dies."

Partelote treats his fears with scorn. She asks indignantly,

"How durst you now for shame say to your love,

That anything could make you feel afeard?

Have you no manly heart, yet have a beard?"

She then gives him a lecture on the physiological causes of dreams, hints at a superfluity of bile, and recommends some simple remedy which her own housewifely skill can concoct from herbs that grow

within the limits of his own manor. She also quotes Cato's opinion of the small faith to be put in dreams. Her lord, who does not seem superior to the common prejudice against having his wife make too liberal a display of her learning, replies by overwhelming her with an avalanche of weighty authorities, each one of which, he tells her, is worth more than ever Cato was. He concludes with a contemptuous defiance of all manner of doses, softening it toward his lady by an adroit compliment.

"But let us speak of mirth, and stint of this:
Dame Partelote, as I have hope of bliss,
Of one thing God hath sent me largest grace;
For, when I see the beauty of your face,
You are so scarlet red about your eyes,
That, when I look on you, my terror dies;
For just so sure as in principio

Mulier est hominis confusio,

(Madam, the meaning of this Latin is,

Woman is man's chief joy and sovereign bliss,)
Whene'er I feel at night your downy side,

I am so full of solace and of pride,

That I defy the threatenings of my dream:

And, with that word, he flew down from the beam,-
For it was day, and eke his spouses all;

And with a chuck he 'gan them for to call,
For he had found a corn lay in the yard:
Royal he was, and felt no more afeard;
He looketh as a lion eyes his foes,

And roameth up and down upon his toes;
Scarcely he deigneth set his feet to ground;
He chucketh when a kernel he hath found,
And all his wives run to him at his call."

JOHN.

What an admirable barn-yard picture!

The

very chanticleer of our childhood, whose parallel Bucks county and Dorking have striven in vain to satisfy our maturer vision with! A chanticleer whose memory writes Ichabod upon the most populous and palatial fowl-houses of manhood! Chaucer's Pegasus ambles along as easily, and crops. the grass and daisies of the roadside as contentedly, as if he had forgotten his wings.

PHILIP.

Yes, the work in hand is, for the time, noblest in the estimation of our poet. His eye never looks beyond it, or cheats it of its due regard by pining for something fairer and more worthy. The royalty is where he is, whether in hovel or palace. Nothing that God has not thought it beneath him to make does he deem it beneath him to study and prove worthy of all admiration. Wordsworth is like him in this.

JOHN.

True, but in Wordsworth the faculty was a conscious acquisition, while in Chaucer it was an inborn gift. Wordsworth attained to it analytically, and so became a philosopher. Chaucer is always a poet.

PHILIP.

The artificial style of writing, which tyrannized when Wordsworth first became sensible of his own powers, so disgusted him, as to warp his inborn poetical faith into a fanaticism. That which should have retained the flexile sensibility of a feeling became stiffened into a theory. He has beheld nature through a loophole, whence he could see but on one side of him, though the view was broad and majestic. His eye has glorified whatever it looked upon, and the clod and the bramble have shared equally in transfiguration with the mountain and the forest. The cloud which the sun's alchemy transmutes to gold is, perhaps, not more grateful for that light than the smallest grass-blade which he shines upon, but the eye reaps a richer harvest of consolement from it. I cannot look the gift-horse in the mouth, especially when he is the true steed of the Muses, but I should have been more grateful to Wordsworth for a larger bunch of lilies and less darnel. Yet his reducing the movements of his poetical nature to a principle, if it has straitened his revenues from some sources, has not been without its rewards also. It gave surety and precision to his eye, so that it looked at once through all outward wrappages to the very life and naked reality of things, and he has added more to our household words than any other poet since Shakspeare. Most of his work is solid, of the true Cyclopean build.