"And in himself he lough right at the wo
Of hem that wepten for his death so faste;
And dampned al our werk that folweth so
The blinde lust, the which that may not laste,
And sholden al our harte on hevene caste.
And forth he wente, shortly for to telle,
Ther as Mercurie sorted him to dwelle...."

Who have prepared our ears to admit this passage, and many as fine?
Not the editors, who point out very properly that it is a close
translation from Boccaccio's "Teseide," xi. 1-3. The information is
valuable, as far as it goes; but what it fails to explain is just the
marvel of the passage--viz., the abiding "Englishness" of it, the
native ring of it in our ears after five centuries of linguistic and
metrical development. To whom, besides Chaucer himself, do we owe
this? For while Chaucer has remained substantially the same,
apparently we have an aptitude that our grandfathers and
great-grandfathers had not. The answer surely is: We owe it to our
nineteenth century poets, and particularly to Tennyson, Swinburne, and
William Morris. Years ago Mr. R.H. Horne said most acutely that the
principle of Chaucer's rhythm is "inseparable from a full and fair
exercise of the genius of our language in versification." This "full
and fair exercise" became a despised, almost a lost, tradition after
Chaucer's death. The rhythms of Skelton, of Surrey, and Wyatt, were
produced on alien and narrower lines. Revived by Shakespeare and the
later Elizabethans, it fell into contempt again until Cowper once more
began to claim freedom for English rhythm, and after him Coleridge,
and the despised Leigh Hunt. But never has its full liberty been so
triumphantly asserted as by the three poets I have named above. If we