As every true poet "has a song in his mind," yet more certainly has every great poet a religious passion in his soul. The emotion he derives from the thing created, is often too strong to dwell upon its imperfections, or rest satisfied in its beauty, and impels his imagination at once to ascend to the creative Principle, wherein alone it can find relief and repose. With this feeling doth the profoundly simple-hearted old poet call upon God, and upon Christ, through the voices of earth's many happy and many suffering children; with this thought doth he seek with aching eye to look through the darkness of forbidden knowledge, at the Tree that burns impalpably beyond; with this yearning doth his soul spring upward in divine rhythmic harmony with those spheres which are ever working while they sing.

Scattered, neglected, overgrown with weeds, and the dust of ignorance and olden time; thy page oft illegible as the pale cobweb, or the tattered banner whereon the name of the victor is confused with that of the vanquished, and the rest all faded,-Father of

English Poetry, thy hand-writing and the writing of the hands guided by thee, have found but a careless preservation among after generations. Somewhat of these primitive inspirations have been mutilated; many damaged by errors of omission and intrusion; many lost. Yet from the fulness and vitality of that genius once breathed over the lost prototypes,-the worm, the moth, and the mouldering years, have lived their lives and done their work upon them, without conveying the records into the all-compounding earth; nor hath the silence of progressive ages been unbroken by a strange cry, at intervals, which told that CHAUCER was not gone into ultimate oblivion, but only sleeping till the modern world awoke. Sleeping, indeed, the deep sleep which follows great labours and long neglect, but, by those who were gazing with reverent love, still seen as of yore;-by those who were listening, still heard,

"Singing with voice memorial-in the shade."

A LIFE

OF

GEOFFREY CHAUCER;

EY PROFESSOR LEONHARD SCHMITZ.

JEFFERY OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER, the Homer of English literature, was born in the second year of the reign of Edward III., 1328. His birth-place has been the subject of much dispute among his biographers, but one passage in his own works renders it incontrovertible that he was born in London. In his 'Testament of Love,' he says, "The city of London, that is to me so dear and sweet, in which I was forth-grown, and more kindly love have I to that place than to any other in earth, (as every kindly creature hath full appetite to that place of his kindly ingendure)." Ano

ther much disputed point is, whether Chaucer was of noble or plebeian origin. This question is, of course, of very small importance to us, who are not inclined to judge in any way of a man like Chaucer by his father or grandfather, but by his own worth as a man and a poet. Considering all circumstances, however, we think it almost unquestionable, that his parents, though not belonging to the nobility, were people of good condition; as we must infer from the manner in which they educated their son. The only circumstance which might seem to prove his noble descent, is his intimate connexion with the court; but this is no proof at all, for we must remember that, in those days of gallant chivalry, men of talent or genius were much more likely to meet with the support and encouragement of the great than in our own time, in which Mammon rules supreme.

Respecting the early life of our poet nothing is known; and the first account we have of him is, that, at the age of eighteen, he was entered a student of the university of Cambridge. This information we derive from a passage in the Court of Love,' a poem