dwell? And just as the poem has begun with a touch of nature, and at the
beginning of its main action has returned to nature, so through the whole
of its course it maintains the same tone. The sleeper awakened--still of
course in his dream--hears the sound of the horn, and the noise of
huntsmen preparing for the chase. He rises, saddles his horse, and
follows to the forest, where the Emperor Octavian (a favourite character
of Carolingian legend, and pleasantly revived under this aspect by the
modern romanticist, Ludwig Tieck--in Chaucer's poem probably a flattering
allegory for the King) is holding his hunt. The deer having been started,
the poet is watching the course of the hunt, when he is approached by a
dog, which leads him to a solitary spot in a thicket among mighty trees;
and here of a sudden he comes upon a man in black, sitting silently by the
side of a huge oak. How simple and how charming is the device of the
faithful dog acting as a guide into the mournful solitude of the faithful
man! For the knight whom the poet finds thus silent and alone, is
rehearsing to himself a lay, "a manner song," in these words:--

I have of sorrow so great wone,
That joye get I never none,
Now that I see my lady bright,
Which I have loved with all my might,
Is from me dead, and is agone.
Alas! Death, what aileth thee
That thou should'st not have taken me,
When that thou took'st my lady sweet?
That was so fair, so fresh, so free,
So goode, that men may well see
Of all goodness she had no meet.

Seeing the knight overcome by his grief, and on the point of fainting, the