We see there how keen his observation was, how vivid and intense his sympathy with nature and the men among whom he moved.

"Farewell, my book," he cried as spring came after winter and the lark's song roused him at dawn to spend hours gazing alone on the daisy whose beauty he sang.

But field and stream and flower and bird, much as he loved them, were less to him than man.

No poetry was over more human than Chaucer's, none ever came more frankly and genially home to men than his "Canterbury Tales." It was the continuation and revision of this work which mainly occupied him during the years from 1384 to 1391.

Its best stories, those of the Miller, the Reeve, the Cook, the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Friar, the Nun, the Priest, and the Pardoner, are ascribed to this period, as well as the Prologue.