What a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of Ossian, and that of Chaucer, and even of Shakespeare and Milton, much more of Dryden, and Pope, and Gray.  Our summer of English poetry like the Greek and Latin before it, seems well advanced toward its fall, and laden with the fruit and foliage of the season, with bright autumnal tints, but soon the winter will scatter its myriad clustering and shading leaves, and leave only a few desolate and fibrous boughs to sustain the snow and rime, and creak in the blasts of ages.  We cannot escape the impression that the Muse has stooped a little in her flight, when we come to the literature of civilized eras.  Now first we hear of various ages and styles of poetry; it is pastoral, and lyric, and narrative, and didactic; but the poetry of runic monuments is of one style, and for every age.  The bard has in a great measure lost the dignity and sacredness of his office.  Formerly he was called a seer, but now it is thought that one man sees as much as another.  He has no longer the bardic rage, and only conceives the deed, which he formerly stood ready to perform.  Hosts of warriors earnest for battle could not mistake nor dispense with the ancient bard.  His lays were heard in the pauses of the fight.  There was no danger of his being overlooked by his contemporaries.  But now the hero and the bard are of different professions.  When we come to the pleasant English verse, the storms have all cleared away and it will never thunder and lighten more.  The poet has come within doors, and exchanged the forest and crag for the fireside, the hut of the Gael, and Stonehenge with its circles of stones, for the house of the Englishman.  No hero stands at the door prepared to break forth into song or heroic action, but a homely Englishman, who cultivates the art of poetry.  We see the comfortable fireside, and hear the crackling fagots in all the verse.

Notwithstanding the broad humanity of Chaucer, and the many social and domestic comforts which we meet with in his verse, we have to narrow our vision somewhat to consider him, as if he occupied less space in the landscape, and did not stretch over hill and valley as Ossian does.  Yet, seen from the side of posterity, as the father of English poetry, preceded by a long silence or confusion in history, unenlivened by any strain of pure melody, we easily come to reverence him.  Passing over the earlier continental poets, since we are bound to the pleasant archipelago of English poetry, Chaucer’s is the first name after that misty weather in which Ossian lived, which can detain us long.  Indeed, though he represents so different a culture and society, he may be regarded as in many respects the Homer of the English poets.  Perhaps he is the youthfullest of them all.  We return to him as to the purest well, the fountain farthest removed from the highway of desultory life.  He is so natural and cheerful, compared with later poets, that we might almost regard him as a personification