INTRODUCTION.

THE purpose of the present edition of Chaucer's Legende of Goode Women is to furnish an easy text-book for beginners in the study of early English literature. To this end, the explanatory notes have been made copious; and it is believed that they will be found to embrace and illustrate every peculiarity of Chaucer's language, the difficulties of which, the student, after a few days' reading, with the aid here afforded, will find to be far more apparent than real. The comparatively few obsolete words which are sprinkled over the surface of Chaucer's pages, together with his antiquated orthography, have deterred many from attacking what appeared at first sight to require more time and study to master than they were able to bestow. The old poet has accordingly been entirely neglected by some, while others have taken up with modernized versions of his works. But the true spirit of his poetry can be reached only through its original language, and not through modernized versions, which convey, however well done, no adequate conception of its subtler elements. The life, the soul of all poetry, is inseparable from its form, and this is especially true of Chaucer's poetry. What is addressed to the insulated understanding can be equally well expressed in any cultivated language; but poetry, whose domain is the sensibilities, owes its peculiar potency to the form in which it was originally conceived by the poet's imagination. Divorced from this, its essence evaporates, and but little more remains than the

mere thought which is secreted in it, and which by itself is not poetry at all. Another serious loss incurred by resorting to modernized versions, is the valuable knowledge to be derived from the original, of the roots and formation of our noble tongue, which "in force, in richness, in aptitude for all the highest purposes of the poet, the philosopher, and the orator, is inferior to that of Greece alone."

To possess an intimate acquaintance with the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, in its original form, is the duty, as it is one of the high privileges, of every cultivated Englishman and Anglo-American, who would know the elements, resources, and capabilities of his native language. Five hundred years and more have passed since Chaucer commenced to write, and four hundred and sixty-three years, this October, since his death in the concluding year of the fourteenth century. During this period, English literature has been enriched by immortal works of genius, that have eclipsed the masterpieces of all other literatures, both ancient and modern; and yet, at this hour, Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote with no native models before him, and who, out of a semibarbarous medley of Saxon and Norman French, was obliged to mould his language and poetic forms, continues to rank with the greatest poets and literary princes of his country. He has lost nothing, but rather gained, by the increase of civilization and culture. He has more readers in the present generation than in any previous one; and his language and the secrets of his harmonies are now perhaps better understood and appreciated than they were even in the reign of Elizabeth, which was nearer by almost three centuries to his own times.

"It is in Chaucer we touch the true height, and look abroad into the kingdoms and glories of our poetical literature, it is with Chaucer that we begin our 'Books of the Poets,' our collections and selections, our pride of place and And the genius of the poet shares the character of his position: he was made for an early poet, and the meta

name.

phors of dawn and spring doubly become him. A morningstar, a lark's exaltation, cannot usher in a glory better. The ‘cheerful morning face,' 'the breezy call of incense-breathing morn,' you recognize in his countenance and voice: it is a voice full of promise and prophecy. He is the good omen of our poetry, the 'good bird,' according to the Romans, 'the best good angel of the spring,' the nightingale, according to his own creed of good luck, heard before the cuckoo.

Up rose the sunne, and up rose Emilie,

And up rose her poet, the first of a line of kings, conscious of futurity in his smile. He is a king and inherits the earth, and expands his great soul smilingly to embrace his great heritage. Nothing is too high for him to touch with a thought, nothing too low to dower with an affection. As a complete creature cognate of life and death, he cries upon God,—as a sympathetic creature he singles out a daisy from the universe ('si douce est la marguerite'), to lie down by half a summer's day and bless it for fellowship. His senses are open and delicate, like a young child's—his sensibilities capacious of supersensuous relations, like an experienced thinker's. Child-like, too, his tears and smiles lie at the edge of his eyes, and he is one proof more among the many, that the deepest pathos and the quickest gayeties hide together in the same nature. He is too wakeful and curious to lose the stirring of a leaf, yet not too wide awake to see visions of green and white ladies between the branches; and a fair house of fame and a noble court of love are built and holden in the winking of his eyelash. And because his imagination is neither too high fantastical' to refuse proudly the gravitation of the earth, nor too 'light of love' to lose it carelessly, he can create as well as dream, and work with clay as well as cloud; and when his men and women stand close by the actual ones, your stop-watch shall reckon no difference in the beating of their hearts. He knew the secret of nature and art,-that truth is beauty, and saying