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.
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