"My throat is cut unto the bone, I trow,
Said this young child, and by the law of kind
I should have died, yea, many hours ago."

The charm is departed. It is often said that the power of liquidness and
fluidity in Chaucer's verse was dependent upon a free, a licentious
dealing with language, such as is now impossible; upon a liberty, such
as Burns too enjoyed, of making words like _neck_, _bird_, into a
dissyllable by adding to them, and words like _cause_, _rhyme_, into a
dissyllable by sounding the _e_ mute. It is true that Chaucer's fluidity
is conjoined with this liberty, and is admirably served by it; but we
ought not to say that it was dependent upon it. It was dependent upon
his talent. Other poets with a like liberty do not attain to the
fluidity of Chaucer; Burns himself does not attain to it. Poets, again,
who have a talent akin to Chaucer's, such as Shakespeare or Keats, have
known how to attain to his fluidity without the like liberty.

And yet Chaucer is not one of the great classics. His poetry transcends
and effaces, easily and without effort, all the romance-poetry of
Catholic Christendom; it transcends and effaces all the English poetry
contemporary with it, it transcends and effaces all the English poetry
subsequent to it down to the age of Elizabeth. Of such avail is poetic
truth of substance, in its natural and necessary union with poetic truth
of style. And yet, I say, Chaucer is not one of the great classics. He
has not their accent. What is wanting to him is suggested by the mere
mention of the name of the first great classic of Christendom, the
immortal poet who died eighty years before Chaucer,--Dante. The accent
of such verse as