represented the difficulties attendant on the passion of love, under the
emblem of a rose which had to be plucked amid thorns,--yet his best
works were written in the leisure of declining years.

The occupation of the poet during the last twelve years of his life was
in writing his "Canterbury Tales," on which his fame chiefly rests;
written not for money, but because he was impelled to write it, as all
true poets write and all great artists paint,--_ex animo_,--because they
cannot help writing and painting, as the solace and enjoyment of life.
For his day these tales were a great work of art, evidently written with
great care. They are also stamped with the inspiration of genius,
although the stories themselves were copied in the main from the French
and Italian, even as the French and Italians copied from Oriental
writers, whose works were translated into the languages of Europe; so
that the romances of the Middle Ages were originally produced in India,
Persia, and Arabia. Absolute creation is very rare. Even Shakspeare, the
most original of poets, was indebted to French and Italian writers for
the plots of many of his best dramas. Who can tell the remote sources of
human invention; who knows the then popular songs which Homer probably
incorporated in his epics; who can trace the fountains of those streams
which have fertilized the literary world?--and hence, how shallow the
criticism which would detract from literary genius because it is
indebted, more or less, to the men who have lived ages ago. It is the
way of putting things which constitutes the merit of men of genius. What
has Voltaire or Hume or Froude told the world, essentially, that it did
not know before? Read, for instance, half-a-dozen historians on Joan of
Arc: they all relate substantially the same facts. Genius and
originality are seen in the reflections and deductions and grand
sentiments prompted by the narrative. Let half-a-dozen distinguished and
learned theologians write sermons on Abraham or Moses or David: they