is often harsh, but seldom tame, and in many
passages it reproduces wonderfully the ocean-like roll of Homer's
hexameters.

From his bright helm and shield did burn a most unwearied fire,
Like rich Antumnus' golden lamp, whose brightness men admire
Past all the other host of stars when, with his cheerful face
Fresh washed in lofty ocean waves, he doth the sky enchase.

The national pride in the achievements of Englishmen, by land and sea,
found expression, not only in prose chronicles and in books, like Stow's
_Survey of London_, and Harrison's _Description of England_ (prefixed to
Holinshed's _Chronicle_), but in long historical and descriptive poems,
like William Warner's _Albion's England_, 1586; Samuel Daniel's _History
of the Civil Wars_, 1595-1602; Michael Drayton's _Barons' Wars,_ 1596,
_England's Heroical Epistles_, 1598, and _Polyolbion,_ 1613. The very
plan of these works was fatal to their success. It is not easy to digest
history and geography into poetry. Drayton was the most considerable
poet of the three, but his _Polyolbion_ was nothing more than a
"gazeteer in rime," a topographical survey of England and Wales, with
tedious personifications of rivers, mountains, and valleys, in thirty
books and nearly one hundred thousand lines. It was Drayton who said of
Marlowe, that he "had in him those brave translunary things that the
first poets had;" and there are brave things in Drayton, but they are
only occasional passages, oases among dreary wastes of sand. His
_Agincourt_ is a spirited war-song, and his _Nymphidia; or, Court of
Faery_, is not unworthy of comparison with Drake's _Culprit Fay_, and is
interesting as bringing in Oberon and Robin Goodfellow, and the popular
fairy lore of Shakspere's _Midsummer Night's Dream_.

The "well-languaged Daniel," of whom Ben Jonson said that he was "a good
honest man, but no poet," wrote, however, one fine meditative piece, his
_Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland,_ a sermon apparently on the text
of the Roman poet Lucretius's famous passage in praise of philosophy,

Suave, mari magno, turbantibus aequora ventis,
E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem.

But the Elizabethan genius found its fullest and truest expression in
the drama. It is a common phenomenon in the history of literature that
some old literary form or mold will run along for centuries without
having any thing poured into it worth keeping, until the moment comes
when the genius of th