"But sheds his might most on the morrow of May,"
i.e. in prose on May-day morning, consonantly to all the testimonies.
Chaucer says that the coming-on of the love-month produces in the heart of the lover
"A maner easè medled with grevaunce."
That is to say, a kind of joy or pleasure, (Fr. aise,) mixed with sadness. He insists, by this expression, upon the strangeness of the kind, peculiar to the willing sufferers under this unique passion, "love's pleasing smart." Did Wordsworth, by intention or misapprehension, leave out this turn of expression, by which, in an age less forward than ours in sentimental researches, Chaucer drew notice to the contradictory nature of the internal state which he described? As if Chaucer had said, "al maner esè," Wordsworth says, "all kinds of pleasure mixed with sorrowing."
In the next line he adds to the intuitions of his master, one of his own profound intuitions, if we construe aright—
"And longing of sweet thoughts that ever long."
That ever long! The sweetest of thoughts are never satisfied with their own deliciousness. Earthly delight, or heavenly delight upon earth, penetrating the soul, stirs in it the perception of its native illimitable capacity for delight. Bliss, which should wholly possess the blest being, plays traitor to itself, turns into a sort of divine dissatisfaction, and brings forth from its teeming and infinite bosom a brood of winged wishes, bright with hues which memory has bestowed, and restless with innate aspirations. Such is our commentary on the truly Wordsworthian line, but it is not a line answerable to Chaucer's—
"And lusty thoughtès full of gret longinge."
Is this hypercriticism? It is the only criticism that can be tolerated betwixt two such rivals as Chaucer and Wordsworth. The scales that weigh poetry should turn with a grain of dust, with the weight of a sunbeam, for they weigh spirit. Or is it saying that Wordsworth has not done his work as well as it was possible to be done? Rather it is inferring, from the failure of the work in his hand, that he and his colleagues have attempted that which was impossible to be done. We will not here hunt down line by line. We put before the reader the means of comparing verse with verse. We have, with 'a thoughtful heart of love,' made the comparison, and feel throughout that the modern will not, cannot, do justice to the old English. The quick sensibility which thrills through the antique strain deserts the most cautious version of it. In short, we fall back upon the old conviction, that verse is a sacred, and song an inspired thing; that the feeling, the thought, the word, and the musical breath spring together out of the soul in one creation; that a translation is a thing not given in rerum natura; consequently that there is nothing else to be done with a great poet saving to leave him in his glory.