That was the loss! and heretofore
I told to thee what I had lost.
Bethink thee what I said. Thou know'st
In sooth full little what thou meanest:
I have lost more than thou weenest.
God wot, alas! right that was she."
"Alas, sir, how? what may that be?
"She is dead." "Nay?" "Yes, by my truth!"
Is that your loss? by God, it is ruth."

And with that word, the hunt breaking up, the knight and the poet depart
to a "long castle with white walls on a rich hill" (Richmond?), where a
bell tolls and awakens the poet from his slumbers, to let him find himself
lying in his bed, and the book with its legend of love and sleep resting
in his hand. One hardly knows at whom more to wonder--whether at the
distinguished French scholar who sees so many trees that he cannot see a
forest, and who, not content with declaring the "Book of the Duchess," as
a whole as well as in its details, a servile imitation of Machault,
pronounces it at the same time one of Chaucer's feeblest productions; or
at the equally eminent English scholar who, with a flippancy which for
once ceases to be amusing, opines that Chaucer ought to "have felt ashamed
of himself for this most lame and impotent conclusion" of a poem "full of
beauties," and ought to have been "caned for it!" Not only was this "lame
and impotent conclusion" imitated by Spenser in his lovely elegy,
"Daphnaida" (I have been anticipated in pointing out this fact by the
author of the biographical essay on "Spenser" in this series--an essay to
which I cannot help taking this opportunity of offering a tribute of
sincere admiration. It may not be an undesigned coincidence that the
inconsolable widower of the "Daphnaida" is named Alcyon, while Chaucer's
poem begins with a reference to the myth of Ceyx and Alcyone. Sir Arthur