In Marlowe's poem there is the same spendthrift fancy, although not the same subtlety. In the first two divisions of the poem the story does, in some sort, get forward; but in the continuation, by George Chapman (who wrote the last four "sestiads"),[21] the path is utterly lost, "with woodbine and the gadding vine o'ergrown." One is reminded that modern poetry, if it has lost in richness, has gained in directness, when one compares any passage in Marlowe and Chapman's _Hero and Leander_ with Byron's ringing lines:
The wind is high on Helle's wave, As on that night of stormy water, When love, who sent, forgot to save The young, the beautiful, the brave, The lonely hope of Sestos' daughter.
[Footnote 21: From Sestos on the Hellespont, where Hero dwelt.]
Marlowe's continuator, Chapman, wrote a number of plays, but he is best remembered by his royal translation of Homer, issued in parts from 1598-1615. This was not so much a literal translation of the Greek, as a great Elizabethan poem, inspired by Homer. It has Homer's fire, but not his simplicity; the energy of Chapman's fancy kindling him to run beyond his text into all manner of figures and conceits. It was written, as has been said, as Homer would have written if he had been an Englishman of Chapman's time. Keats's fine ode, _On First Looking into Chapman's Homer_, is well known. In his translation of the _Odyssey_, Chapman employed the ten-syllabled heroic line chosen by most of the standard translators; but for the _Iliad_ he used the long "fourteener." Certainly all later versions--Pope's and Cowper's and Lord Derby's and Bryant's--seem pale against the glowing exuberance of Chapman's English, which degenerates easily into sing-song in the hands of a feeble metrist. In Chapman it 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_.