Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader · Chapter 179=220.= Chaucer's Love of Nature
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He was the first great poet who really loved outward nature as the source of conscious pleasurable emotion. The Troubadour hailed the return of spring, but with him it was a piece of empty ritualism. Chaucer took a true delight in the new green of the leaves, and the return of singing birds—a delight as simple as that of Robin Hood:—
"In summer when the shaws be sheen, And leaves be large and long, It is full merry in fair forest To hear the small birds' song."
He has never so much as heard of the burthen and the mystery of all this unintelligible world. His flowers and trees and birds have never bothered themselves with Spinoza. He himself sings more like a bird than any other poet, because it never occurred to him, as to Goethe, that he ought to do so. He pours himself out in sincere joy and thankfulness. When we compare Spenser's imitations of him with the original passages, we feel that the delight of the later poet was more in the expression than in the thing itself. Nature, with him, is only to be transfigured by art. We walk among Chaucer's sights and sounds; we listen to Spenser's musical reproduction of them. In the same way the pleasure which Chaucer takes in telling his stories, has, in itself, the effect of consummate skill, and makes us follow all the windings of his fancy with sympathetic interest. His best tales run on like one of our inland rivers, sometimes hastening a little and turning upon themselves in eddies, that dimple without retarding the current, sometimes loitering smoothly, while here and there a quiet thought, a tender feeling, a pleasant image, a golden-hearted verse, opens quietly as a water-lily to float on the surface without breaking it into ripple…. Chaucer never shows any signs of effort, and it is a main proof of his excellence that he can be so inadequately sampled by detached passages, by single lines taken away from the connection in which they contribute to the general effect. He has that continuity of thought, that evenly prolonged power, and that delightful equanimity, which characterize the higher orders of mind. There is something in him of the disinterestedness that made the Greeks masters in art. His phrase is never importunate. His simplicity is that of elegance, not of poverty. The quiet unconcern with which he says his best things is peculiar to him among English poets, though Goldsmith, Addison, and Thackeray, have approached it in prose. He prattles inadvertently away, and all the while, like the princess in the story, lets fall a pearl at every other word. It is such a piece of good luck to be natural. It is the good gift which the fairy god-mother brings to her prime favorites in the cradle. If not genius, it is alone what makes genius amiable in the arts. If a man have it not he will never find it; for when it is sought it is gone.
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=Edgar Allen Poe, 1811-1849.= (Manual, p. 510.)
From "The Masque of the Red Death."