“Pees litel sone, I wol do thee no harm:
With that hire couverchief of hire hed she braid,
And over his litel eyen she it laid.
O litel child, alas! what is thy gilt
That never wroughtest sinne as yet parde?”
The gentle, natural words, written five hundred years ago, went to her heart. She loved the gaiety, the bustle, the gossip, the sense of colour and vitality in that long procession which wound from the Tabard Inn, along the white roads full of sunshine, which led to Canterbury.
She read the ballads which like vivid lightning flashes illumine the darkness of the Middle Ages, and show the mainsprings of human action to be ever the old mainsprings of love and hate.
She came to the Elizabethan poets—to the period when England had become “a nest of singing birds.” She found Spenser’s glorious love-song, and the wonderful cry in which Marlowe’s Faust links one great love-story to another.
“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships