Mary Baldwin College - Bluestocking Yearbook (Staunton, VA)

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The Augusta Seminary Antiual. 27 Chaucer. There are certain points of resemblance and contrast be- tween Dante and Chaucer. With Dante, life represented the passage of the soul from a state of nature to a state of grace. ' ■ ' With Chaucer, life is a pilgrimage, but only that his eye may be delighted with the varieties of costume and charac- ter. ' ■■ With Dante the main question is the saving of the soul, with Chaucer it is the conduct of life. Dante applies himself to the realities, Chaucer to the scenery of life, and the former is consequently the more universal poet, as the latter is the more truly national one. Dante represents the justice of God, and Chaucer his loving-kindness. Gower has positively raised tediousness to the precision of science, he has made dulness an heirloom for the students of our literary history. His best tales (Chaucer ' s) run on like one of our inland rivers, sometimes hastening a little and turning upon them- selves in eddies that dimple without retarding the current ; sometimes loitering smoothly, while here and there a quiet thought, a tender feeling, a pleasant image, a golden -hearted verse, opens quietly as a water-lily, to floaton thesurface with- out breaking it into ripples. The vulgar intellectual palate hankers after the titillation of foaming phrase, and thinks nothing good for much that does not go off with a pop like a champagne cork. The mellow suavity of more precious vintages seems insipid: but the taste, in proportion as it re- fines, learns to appreciate the indefinable flavor, too subtle for analj ' sis. A manner has prevailed of late in which every other word seems to be underscored as in a school-girl ' s letter. Spenser. A classic is properl} ' a book which maintains itself by virtue of that happy coalescence of matter and style, that innate and exquisite sympathy between the thought that gives life and the form that consents to every mood of grace

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26 The Aiigicsfa Seminary Annual. crawled through the window, and in a minute had left the Seminary far behind him. When he made his report at the next meeting of the Folk- Lore Society, he received a vote of thanks for having contributed such valuable and carefully tabulated informa- tion to the cause of science. ' ' Carrie Bell. Lowell. From Our Note Books. Since last August w hen the news of Lowell ' s death went over the land, we have taken an especial interest in all that conc erns him. A look of pleasure may be seen on each face when it is suggested that we read what he has to say on the subject in hand, for after spending a few hours over one of his essays we feel as though we had taken a pleasant holiday. During the year we have read a number of his literary criticisms, mainly, the essays in Amoig My Books and My Study Window, and as we have been impressed with now his wit and now his eloquence, have jotted down in our note-books what we thought were some of the choicest pas- sages. From these note-books we have selected for The Anmial a few of those passages that we would like to keep as a memento of our Literature work, and have arranged them under the headings of the essays from w hich they are taken ; we wish they might give others the pleasure they have given us. Note — .We regret that the Boston daemon was not here on May day to learn that under a stone lifted that morning may be found the color of the prospective sweet heart ' s hair, and that the face washed in dew at sunrise on the same day will always be beautiful. — Eds.

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8 The Augusta Seminary Annual. and dignity, which can be simple without being vulgar, elevated without being distant, and which is something neither ancient nor modern, always new and incapable of trrowing: old. Literature that loses its meaning, or the best part of it, when it gets beyond sight of the parish steeple, is not what I understand by literature. I can understand the nationality of Burns when he turns his plough aside to spare the rough thistle, and hope he may write a song or two for dear old Scotia ' s sake. k That sort of nation- ality belongs to a country of which we are all citizens, — that country of the heart which has no boundaries laid down on the map. They (the poets in Spenser ' s age), most of them sleep well now, as once they made their readers sleep, and their huge remains lie embedded in the deep morasses of Chal- mers and Anderson. We wonder at the length of face and general atrabilious look that mark the portraits of the men of that generation, but it is no marvel when even their re- laxations were such down right hard workers. Fathers when their day on earth was up must have folded down the lea f and left the task to be finished by their sons, — a dreary inheritance. The form of Spenser ' s Shepherd ' s Calendar, it is true, is artificial, absurdly so if you look at it merel} ' - from the outside, — not, perhaps, the wisest way to look at any- thing, unless it be a jail or a volume of the Congressional Globe, — but the spirit of it is fresh and original. So entirely are beauty and delight in it, the native ele- ment of Spen.ser, that, whenever in the Faery Queen ' ou come suddenly on the moral it gives you a shock of un- pleasant surprise, a kind of grit, as when one ' s teeth close on a bit of s ravel in a dish of straw-berries and cream. Speaking of the allegory in Faery Queen ; the alle- gory won ' t bite us or meddle with us if we don ' t meddle with it.