nd to feel how delicate and
evanescent is the charm of verse, we have only to read Wordsworth's
first three lines of this stanza after Chaucer's--

'My throat is cut unto the bone, I trow,
Said this young child, and by the law of kind
I should have died, yea, many hours ago.'

The charm is departed. It is often said that the power of liquidness
and fluidity in Chaucer's verse was dependent upon a free, a licentious
dealing with language, such as is now impossible; upon a liberty, such
as Burns too enjoyed, of making words like _neck, bird_, into a
dissyllable by adding to them, and words like _cause, rhyme_, into a
dissyllable by sounding the _e_ mute. It is true that Chaucer's
fluidity is conjoined with this liberty, and is admirably served by it;
but we ought not to say that it was dependent upon it. It was
dependent upon his talent. Other poets with a like liberty do not
attain to the fluidity of Chaucer; Burns himself does not attain to it.
Poets, again, who have a talent akin to Chaucer's, such as Shakespeare
or Keats, have known how to attain his fluidity without the like
liberty.

And yet Chaucer is not one of the great classics. His poetry
transcends and effaces, easily and without effort, all the
romance-poetry of Catholic Christendom; it transcends and effaces all
the English poetry contemporary with it, it transcends and effaces all
the English poetry subsequent to it down to the age of Elizabeth. Of
such avail is poetic truth of substance, in its natural and necessary
union with poetic truth of style. And yet, I say, Chaucer is not one
of the great classics. He has not their accent. What is wanting to
him is suggested by the mere mention of the name of the first great
classic of Christendom, the immortal poet who died eighty years before
Chaucer,--Dante. The accent of such verse as

'In la sua volontade e nostra pace . . .'

is altogether beyond Chaucer's reach; we praise him, but we feel that
this accent is out of the question for him. It may be said that it was
necessarily out of the reach of any poet in the England of that stage
of growth. Possibly; but we are to adopt a real, not a historic,
estimate of poetry. However we may account for its absence, something
is wanting, then, to the poetry of Chaucer, which poetry must have
before it can be placed in the glorious class of the best. And there
is no doubt what that something is. It is the _spoudaiotes_ the high
and excellent