Deep in the magic mirror of his mind.

Thence oft, returning homeward, on the book,--
His of Certaldo, or the bard whose lays
Were lost to love in Scythia,--he would look
Till his fix'd eyes the dancing letters daze:
Then forth to the near fields, and feed his gaze
On one fair flower in starry myriads spread,
And in her graciousness be comforted:--

Then, joyous with a poet's joy, to draw
With genial touch, and strokes of patient skill,
The very image of each thing he saw:--
He limn'd the man all round, for good or ill,
Having both sighs and laughter at his will;
Life as it went he grasp'd in vision true,
Yet stood outside the scene his pencil drew.

--Man's inner passions in their conscience-strife,
The conflicts of the heart against the heart,
The mother yearning o'er the infant's life,
The maiden wrong'd by wealth and lecherous art,
The leper's loathsome cell from man apart,
War's hell of lust and fire, the village-woe,
The tinsel chivalry veiling shame below,--

Not his to draw,--to see, perhaps:--Our eyes
Hold bias with our humour:--His, to paint
With Nature's freshness, what before him lies:
The knave, the fool; the frolicsome, the quaint:
His the broad jest, the laugh without restraint,
The ready tears, the spirit lightly moved;
Loving the world, and by the world beloved.

So forth fared Chaucer on his pilgrimage
Through England's humours; in immortal song
Bodying the form and pressure of his age,
Tints gay as pure, and delicate as strong;
Still to the Tabard the blithe travellers throng,
Seen in his mind so vividly, that we
Know them more clearly than the men we see.

Fair France, bright Italy, those numbers train'd;
First in his pages Nature wedding Art
Of all our sons of song; yet he remain'd
True English of the English at his heart:--
He stood between two worlds, yet had no part
In that new order of the dawning day
Which swept the masque of chivalry away.

O Poet of romance and courtly glee
And downcast eager glance that shuns the sky,
Above, about, are signs thou canst not see,
Portents in heaven and earth!--And one goes by
With other than thy prosperous, laughing eye,
Framing the rough web of his rueful lays,
The sorrow and the sin--with bitter gaze

As down the Strand he stalks, a sable shade
Of death, while, jingling like the elfin train,
In silver samite knight and dame and maid
Ride to the tourney on the barrier'd plain;
And he must bow in humble mute disdain,
And that worst wo