Criseyde," when he addresses his "litel book"--

"And for there is so great diversitee
In English, and in wryting of our tonge,
So preye I God that noon miswryte thee,
Ne thee mismetre for defaute of tonge.
And red wher-so thou be, or elles songe,
That thou be understoude I God beseche!..."

And therewith, as though on purpose to defeat his fears, he proceeded
to turn three stanzas of Boccaccio into English that tastes almost as
freshly after five hundred years as on the day it was written. He is
speaking of Hector's death:--

"And whan that he was slayn in this manere,
His lighte goost ful blisfully it went
Up to the holownesse of the seventh spere
In convers leting every element;
And ther he saugh, with ful avysement,
The erratik starres, herkening armonye
With sownes ful of hevenish melodye.

"And down from thennes faste he gan avyse
This litel spot of erthe, that with the see
Embraced is, and fully gan despyse
This wrecched world, and held al vanitee
To respect of the pleyn felicitee
That is in hevene above; and at the laste,
Ther he was slayn, his loking down he caste;

"And in himself he lough right at the wo
Of hem that wepten for his death so faste;
And dampned al our werk that folweth so
The blinde lust, the which that may not laste,
And sholden al our harte on hevene caste.
And forth he wente, shortly for to telle,
Ther as Mercurie sorted him to dwelle...."

Who have prepared our ears to admit this passage, and many as fine?
Not the editors, who point out very properly that it is a close
translation from Boccaccio's "Teseide," xi. 1-3. The information is
valuable, as far as it goes; but what it fails to explain is just the
marvel of the passage--viz., the abiding "Englishness" of it, the
native ring of it in our ears after five centuries of linguistic and
metrical development. To whom, besides Chaucer himself, do we owe
this? For while Chaucer has remained substantially the same,
apparently we have an aptitude that our grandfathers and
great-grandfathers had not. The answer surely is: We owe it to our
nineteenth century poets, and particularly to Tennyson, Swinburne, and
William Morris. Years ago Mr. R.H. Horne said most acutely that the
principle of Chaucer's rhythm is "inseparable from a full and fair
exercise of the genius of our language in versification." This "