"Chaucer, like Shakespeare, invented almost nothing. Wherever he found
anything directed to Geoffrey Chaucer, he took it and made the most of
it….
"Sometimes he describes amply by the merest hint, as where the Friar, before setting himself softly down, drives away the cat. We know without need of more words that he has chosen the snuggest corner."
Lowell usually makes the laziest readers do a little pleasant thinking. It is common for even inert students to investigate his meaning; for instance, in his statements that in the age of Pope "everybody ceremoniously took a bushel basket to bring a wren's egg to market in," and that everybody "called everything something else."
The high ideals and sterling common sense of Lowell's political prose deserve special mention. In Democracy (1886), which should be read by every citizen, Lowell shows that old age had not shattered his faith in ideals. "I believe," he said, "that the real will never find an irremovable basis until it rests on the ideal." Voters and lawmakers are to-day beginning to realize that they will go far to find in the same compass a greater amount of common sense than is contained in these words:—
"It is only when the reasonable and the practicable are denied that men demand the unreasonable and impracticable; only when the possible is made difficult that they fancy the impossible to be easy. Fairy tales are made out of the dreams of the poor." [Footnote: Democracy and Other Addresses, p. 15.]
General Characteristics.—Lowell has written verse which shows sympathetic treatment of nature. His lines To the Dandelion:—
"Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,
First pledge of blithesome May
Which children pluck, and full of pride uphold
* * * * *
… thou art more dear to me
Than all the prouder summer-blooms may be,"
show rare genuineness of feeling. No one not enthusiastic about nature would ever have heard her calling to him:—
"To mix his blood with sunshine, and to take
The winds into his pulses."
He invites us in March to watch:—