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The virtue is such
as we shall not find, perhaps, in all English poetry, outside the poets
whom I have named as the special inheritors of Chaucer's tradition. A
single line, however, is too little if we have not the strain of
Chaucer's verse well in our memory; let us take a stanza. It is from
_The Prioress's Tale_, the story of the Christian child murdered in a
Jewry--
"My throte is cut unto my nekke-bone
Saide this child, and as by way of kinde
I should have deyd, yea, longe time agone;
But Jesu Christ, as ye in bookes finde,
Will that his glory last and be in minde,
And for the worship of his mother dere
Yet may I sing _O Alma_ loud and clere."
Wordsworth has modernized this Tale, and to feel how delicate and
evanescent is the charm of verse, we have only to read Wordsworth's
first three lines of this stanza after Chaucer's--
"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.


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