possess." And the poet Keats admits that the reading of Chapman's Homer was to him the opening of a new world.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men.
Looked at each other with a wild surmise,
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The translation of the ILIAD is made in a long verse of seven accents (sometimes mentioned as of fourteen syllables, though there are sometimes fifteen), which may be called iambic heptameter (7 x a). But it is really nothing more than the ordinary ballad metre (lines of 4 x a and 3 x a alternately), printed in long lines. The Odyssey is written in the ordinary heroic verse. The following passage is from the sixth book of the Iliad:

HECTOR AND HIS LITTLE BOY.

This sayd, he reacht1 to take his sonne: who of his armes affraide,"
And then, the horse-haire plume, with which he was so overlaide,
Nodded so horrible he clinged back to his nurse and cryed:
Laughter affected his great syre,3 who doft4 and laid aside
His fearfull helme, that on the earth cast round about it light:
Then took and kist his loued sonne, and (ballancing his weight
In dancing him) these louing vowes to living Jove he usde
And all the other bench of gods: O you that have infusde
Soule to this infant, now send downe this blessing on his starre,
Let his renoune be clear as mine: equall his strength in warre! *

3. ROBERT SOUTHWELL (1560–95) was a member of the Society of Jesus. A law was passed in the age of Elizabeth banishing all Jesuits from the kingdom, upon pain of death. Southwell, in defiance of the law, laboured as a priest for eight years in secret; but was arrested, tried, convicted, and hanged at Tyburn. His poems are on moral and religious subjects. They are worthy of note for their seriousness and good sense, and for the high polish and careful finish of the workmanship.

*For the notes, see p. 171.

K

The lopped tree in time may grow again;

Most naked plants renew both fruit and flower;
The sorriest wight may find release of pain,

The driest soil sucks in some moistening shower;
Time goes by turns, and chances change by course,
From foul to fair, from better hap3 to worse.

The sea of fortune doth not ever flow;

She draws her favours to the lowest ebb:
Her tides have equal times to come and go;

Her loom doth weave the fine and coarsest web:

No joy so great but runneth to an end,
No hap so hard that may in fine1 amend.

Not always fall of leaf, nor ever spring;
Not endless night, nor yet eternal day:
The saddest birds a season find to sing,

The roughest storm a calm may soon allay.
Thus, with succeeding turns, God tempereth 5 all,
That man may hope to rise, yet fear to fall.*

4. SAMUEL DANIEL (1562-1619) was born two years before Shakspeare, and died three years after him. He was educated at Oxford, and was afterwards tutor to Lady Anne Clifford, who married an Earl of Pembroke. He was attached to the court, and was the second who held the office of poet-laureate. Spenser was the first. His chief poems are:

(1) A History of the Wars between the Houses of York and Lancaster;

(2) Musophilus;

(3) An Epistle to Lady Margaret, Countess of Cumberland.

The Musophilus (which Professor Craik thinks his best poem) is a dialogue between Philocosmus (a lover of the world) and Musophilus (a lover of the Muses); and consists chiefly of a defence of the cultivation of poetry. The careful polish of his style and the purity of his English earned for him the title of the "well-languaged Daniel." The first of the following passages is from the Musophilus, and the second from the Epistle.*

*For the notes, see p. 172.

Sacred Religion! Mother of Form and Fear!
How gorgeously sometimes dost thou sit deck'd!
What pompous2 vestures do we make thee wear!
What stately piles we prodigally3 erect!
How sweet perfum'd thou art! how shining clear!
How solemnly observ'd! with what respect!

Another time all plain, all quite thread-bare,
Thou must have all within, and nought without;*
Sit poorly, without light, disrob'd; no care
Of outward grace, to amuse the poor devout;
Powerless, unfollow'd; scarcely men can spare
The necessary rites to set thee out.

He that of such a height hath built his mind,
And reared the dwelling of his thoughts so strong,
As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame
Of his resolved powers; nor all the wind
Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong

His settled peace, or to disturb the same;
What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may
The boundless wastes 7 and wilds of man survey!

8

And whilst distraught ambition compasses,
And is encompass'd;9 whilst as 10 craft deceives
And is deceived; whilst man doth ransack 11 man,
And builds on blood, and rises by distress; 12
And th' inheritance of desolation leaves
To great expecting hopes; 13 he looks thereon
As from the shore of peace, with unwet eye,
And bears no venture 14 in impiety.

Thus, madam, fares that man that hath prepared
A rest for his desires, and sees all things
Beneath him; and hath learned this book of man,
Full of the fruits of frailty: 15 and compared

The best of glory with her sufferings:

By whom, I see, you labour all you can

To plant your heart; and set your thoughts as near His glorious mansion as your powers can bear.

5. MICHAEL DRAYTON (1563-1631) was, like Shakspeare, a Warwickshire man. He is the most voluminous of the seventeenth century poets, and certainly not the most interesting. He is the author of three long poems :—

(1) The Barons' Wars;

(2) England's Heroical Epistles;
(3) Polyolbion.

It is by the last that he is best known, if he can now be said to be known at all, in any honest sense of the word. There is probably no Englishman of the present century who has read this poem from beginning to end; and most educated persons know nothing more than its name. It consists of thirty books, each of one thousand lines. It is in reality a kind of “Murray's Guide" to England; and, though it is full of learning and not without fancy, the reading of it soon becomes excessively tedious. Drayton has written more than 100,000 lines altogether; but very few of them have "lived." The Polyolbion is written in alexandrines; but the alexandrines are of very inferior construction. Indeed, it may fairly be said that they are not alexandrines at all, but really pairs of iambic trimeters printed in one line. Hence the extreme monotony of the poem, which seems to consist of a succession of short jerks. This monotony has been sometimes insinuated by a critic here and there, who dared to leave the crowd of unreflecting admirers; but the reason of it has never been pointed out. The reason of it is to be found in the position of the cæsura, which is always in the same place-always, that is, in the very middle, after the third foot. This, it will be found, is everywhere the case, as well as in the following lines:

Now Sabrine as a queen

Is absolutely placed

Of crystal richly wrought

Her grace becoming well

miraculously fair,

:

in her imperial chair

that gloriously did shine,

a creature so divine.

This might just as well have been printed in short trimeter lines; but then few would have read it.

Now Sabrine as a queen
Miraculously fair, etc., etc.

But the cæsura (or halt, or break, or pause) in a verse is the chief condition of its melody; and in the verses of all great poets the posi

tion of it is constantly varied. In Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton, the symbol of this cæsura would be an ever varying curve; in Drayton it is a hard straight line. One wonders, therefore, how readers who had been accustomed to the subtle and labyrinthine melody of Shakspeare's lines, could bear to read even a page of Drayton, however fine his sense and his imagery may have seemed to them. Another fault to be fairly found with it is, that it has not the unity of a work of art; it is merely a dictionary of places in verse, without design, without beginning or end, and without any permeating or connecting interest. The following passage is from the POLYOLBION :

Then from her burnished gate the goodly glittering East
Gilds every mountain-top, which late the humorous' night
Bespangled had with pearl, to please the morning's sight;
On which the mirthful quires,2 with their clear open throats,
Unto the joyful morn so strain their warbling notes
That hills and valleys ring, and even the echoing air
Seems all composed of sounds about them everywhere.
The throstle 3 with shrill sharps, as purposely he song+
To awake the listless sun, or chiding that so long

He was in coming forth that 5 should the thickets thrill;
The woosel 6 near at hand, that hath a golden bill,
As nature him had marked of purpose t' let us see
That from all other birds his tunes should different be.

Book xiii.

6. SIR JOHN DAVIES (1570-1626) was Chief-Justice of Ireland, and the author of a long poem, entitled, Nosce Teipsum; or, The Soul of Man and Immortality thereof. It was published in 1599, and passed through four editions in the lifetime of the author. It is written in iambic pentameter, alternately rhymed, and in stanzas of four lines, called quatrains; the same kind of verse which we find in the Annus Mirabilis of Dryden, and in the Elegy of Gray. Hallam places it above much of the poetry of the last two centuries, "whether we estimate it by the pleasure it imparts, or by the intellectual power it displays." Davies writes, that we do not know ourselves, but only other things, until affliction comes in and shows us to ourselves.