And in a tombe of marble stonës clere
Enclosen they his litel body swete;
Ther he is now: God leve us for to mete!
How tenderly the words all match to the delicate meaning! This delightful poet knows every finest resource of language: he subdues and trails after him all its harmonies. No grimalkin stretching out silken paws touches so lightly what he wants only to touch; no cat with sharpest claws clings so tenaciously to what he would grip with his earnester words. He is a painter whose technique is never at fault—whose art is an instinct.
Yet—it must be said—there is no grand horizon at the back of his pictures: pleasant May-mornings and green meadows a plenty; pathetic episodes, most beguiling tracery of incidents and of character, but never strong, passionate outbursts showing profound capacity for measurement of deepest emotion. We cannot think of him as telling with any adequate force the story of King Lear, in his delirium of wrath: Macbeth’s stride and hushed madness and bated breath could not come into the charming, mellifluous rhythm of Chaucer’s most tragic story without making a dissonance that would be screaming.
But his descriptions of all country things are garden-sweet. He touches the daisies and the roses with tints that keep them always in freshest, virgin, dewy bloom; and he fetches the forest to our eye with words that are brim-full of the odors of the woods and of the waving of green boughs.
In our next talk we shall speak of some who sang beside him, and of some who followed; but of these not one had so rare a language, and not one had so true an eye.