that he knaws off the small end of pears to get at the seeds.  He steals the corn from under the noses of my poultry.  But what would you have?  He will come down upon the limb of the tree I am lying under, till he is within a yard of me.  He and his mate will scurry up and down the great black-walnut for my diversion, chattering like monkeys.  Can I sign his death-warrant who has tolerated me about his grounds so long?  Not I. Let them steal, and welcome, I am sure I should, had I the same bringing up and the same temptation.  As for the birds, I do not believe there is one of them but does more good than harm; and of how many featherless bipeds can this be said.

* * * * *

=_220._= CHAUCER’S LOVE OF NATURE.

He was the first great poet who really loved outward nature as the source of conscious pleasurable emotion.  The Troubadour hailed the return of spring, but with him it was a piece of empty ritualism.  Chaucer took a true delight in the new green of the leaves, and the return of singing birds—­a delight as simple as that of Robin Hood:—­

  “In summer when the shaws be sheen,
  And leaves be large and long,
  It is full merry in fair forest
  To hear the small birds’ song.”

He has never so much as heard of the burthen and the mystery of all this unintelligible world.  His flowers and trees and birds have never bothered themselves with Spinoza.  He himself sings more like a bird than any other poet, because it never occurred to him, as to Goethe, that he ought to do so.  He pours himself out in sincere joy and thankfulness.  When we compare Spenser’s imitations of him with the original passages, we feel that the delight of the later poet was more in the expression than in the thing itself.  Nature, with him, is only to be transfigured by art.  We walk among Chaucer’s sights and sounds; we listen to Spenser’s musical reproduction of them.  In the same way the pleasure which Chaucer takes in telling his stories, has, in itself, the effect of consummate skill, and makes us follow all the windings of his fancy with sympathetic interest.  His best tales run on like one of our inland rivers, sometimes hastening a little and turning upon themselves in eddies, that dimple without retarding the current, sometimes loitering smoothly, while here and there a quiet thought, a tender feeling, a pleasant image, a golden-hearted verse, opens quietly as a water-lily to float on the surface without breaking it into ripple....  Chaucer never shows any signs of effort, and it is a main proof of his excellence that he can be so inadequately sampled by detached passages, by single lines taken away from the connection in which they contribute to the general effect.  He has that continuity of thought, that evenly prolonged power, and that delightful equanimity, which characterize the higher orders of mind.  There is something in him of the disinterestedness that made the Greeks masters in art.  His phrase