A land of old upheaven from the abyss By fire, to sink into the abyss again; Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt, The phantom circle of a moaning sea. In descriptive poetry in its relation to Nature-painting, it may safely be said that from nearly every point of view Tennyson is our greatest artist, and as long as the world he paints, or at least as long as our language lasts, he is never likely to lose his charm or, perhaps, his supremacy. T CHAUCER AT ELTHAM THERE is no more difficult historical task than to realise what a place or district looked like at a given period. In London and its neighbourhood change goes on unchangeably. In distant places, the Backwoods of Canada or the Australian Bush, for example, we feel that practically, except for sudden earthquakes or the slow growth of giant conifers, what the forest looked like five centuries ago, that it probably looked like last week, and we have to think of some more remote epoch, before Niagara was turned over the cliff, or while great lakes irrigated the deserts. Is it impossible to reconstruct a view of the lower Thames as it was in the fourteenth century, when Chaucer sent his pilgrims— each primed with his story-to ride through the Garden of England from the Tabard to Harbledown? Of all the places through which they passed, of all the buildings they can have seen, is there one of which we can say with certainty, "Here is a scene which unquestionably was familiar to Geoffrey Chaucer"? The pilgrims set out from Southwark. London Bridge brought them there. Old London Bridge is |