Wherever he found
anything directed to Geoffrey Chaucer, he took it and made the most of
it....
"Sometimes he describes amply by the merest hint, as where the Friar,
before setting himself softly down, drives away the cat. We know without
need of more words that he has chosen the snuggest corner."
Lowell usually makes the laziest readers do a little pleasant thinking. It
is common for even inert students to investigate his meaning; for instance,
in his statements that in the age of Pope "everybody ceremoniously took a
bushel basket to bring a wren's egg to market in," and that everybody
"called everything something else."
The high ideals and sterling common sense of Lowell's political prose
deserve special mention. In _Democracy_ (1886), which should be read by
every citizen, Lowell shows that old age had not shattered his faith in
ideals. "I believe," he said, "that the real will never find an irremovable
basis until it rests on the ideal." Voters and lawmakers are to-day
beginning to realize that they will go far to find in the same compass a
greater amount of common sense than is contained in these words:--
"It is only when the reasonable and the practicable are denied that men
demand the unreasonable and impracticable; only when the possible is made
difficult that they fancy the impossible to be easy.
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