ove himself; and who pleads her cause
before the awful Mother of all things, figured as Chaucer had already
imagined her:--

Great Nature, ever young, yet full of eld;
Still moving, yet unmoved from her stead;
Unseen of any, yet of all beheld,
Thus sitting on her throne.

He imagines all the powers of the upper and nether worlds assembled
before her on his own familiar hills, instead of Olympus, where she
shone like the Vision which "dazed" those "three sacred saints" on
"Mount Thabor." Before her pass all things known of men, in rich and
picturesque procession; the Seasons pass, and the Months, and the
Hours, and Day and Night, Life, as "a fair young lusty boy," Death, grim
and grisly;--

Yet is he nought but parting of the breath,
Ne ought to see, but like a shade to weene,
Unbodied, unsoul'd, unheard, unseene--

and on all of them the claims of the Titaness, Mutability, are
acknowledged. Nothing escapes her sway in this present state, except
Nature which, while seeming to change, never really changes her ultimate
constituent elements, or her universal laws. But when she seemed to have
extorted the admission of her powers, Nature silences her. Change is
apparent, and not real; and the time is coming when all change shall end
in the final changeless change.

"I well consider all that ye have said,
And find that all things stedfastnesse do hate
And changed be; yet, being rightly wayd,
They are not changed from their first estate;
But by their change their being do dilate,
And turning to themselves at length againe,
Do worke their owne perfection so by fate:
Then over them Change doth not rule and raigne,
But they raigne over Change, and do their states maintaine.

"Cease therefore, daughter, further to aspire,
And thee content thus to be rul'd by mee,
For thy decay thou seekst by thy desire;
But time shall come that all shall changed bee,
And from thenceforth none no more change shal see."
So was the Titanesse put downe and whist,
And Jove confirm'd in his imperiall see.
Then was that whole assembly quite dismist,
And Natur's selfe did vanish, whither no man wist.

What he meant--how far he was thinking of those daring arguments of
religious and philosophical change of which the world was beginning to
be full, we cannot now tell. The allegory was not finished: at least it
is los