d hell
And the everlasting Love as well,
Little child."[10]

Noyes has published several volumes of lyrical verse. Some of it
possesses the lightness of these elfish tales. _The Barrel Organ_,
_The Song of Re-Birth_, and _Forty Singing Seamen_ are among his
finest lyrics. They display much rhythmic beauty and variety. He
strikes a deeply sorrowful and passionate note in _The Haunted Palace_
and _De Profundis_. A line like this in _The Haunted Palace_--

"...I saw the tears
Bleed through her eyes with the slow pain of years,"[11]

indicates the strong emotional metaphor that occasionally deepens the
passion of his verse.

England's sea power, immortalized in song from Beowulf to Swinburne,
often inspires Noyes. His finest long poem is _Drake: An English Epic_
(1908), which relates the adventures of this Elizabethan sea-captain
and his victory over the Armada. The spirit of a daring romantic age
of discovery is shown in these lines that tell how Drake and his men--

"...went out
To danger as to a sweetheart far away,
Who even now was drawing the western clouds
Like a cymar of silk and snow-white furs
Close to her, till her body's beauty seemed
Clad in a mist of kisses."[12]

Another volume of poems, _Tales of the Mermaid Tavern_ (1913), brings
us into the company of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spencer, Jonson, Raleigh,
and others of the great Elizabethan group that made the Mermaid Tavern
their chosen resort. Greene's farewell to Shakespeare,--

"You took my clay and made it live,"[13]

shows that Noyes has caught something of the spirit that animated
Elizabethan England.

Noyes is one of the most spontaneous and fluent writers of modern
English poetry. Whether he is mystical, dramatic, playful, or marching
along the course of a long narrative poem, he handles his verse with
ease and facility. His language, his rhythm, and his thought are most
happily blended in his graceful singing lyrics. The work of Noyes is
inspired by the desire to show that all things and all souls are--

"One with the dream that triumphs beyond the light of the spheres,
We come from the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of
Years."[14]

THE MODERN DRAMA

The revival of the drama is a characteristic feature of the latter
part of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The
plays of the Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), affected England
profoundly in the last decade of the ninete