templars, and citizens of ancient Bristol. Among
others, "Elle's sprite speaks":

"Were I once more cast in a mortal frame,
To hear the chantry-song sound in mine ear,
To hear the masses to our holy dame,
To view the cross-aisles and the arches fair!
Through the half-hidden silver-twinkling glare
Of yon bright moon in foggy mantles dressed,
I must content this building to aspere,[23]
Whilst broken clouds the holy sight arrest;
Till, as the nights grow old, I fly the light.
Oh! were I man again, to see the sight!"

Perhaps the most engaging of the Rowley poems are "An Excelente Balade of
Charitie," written in the rhyme royal; and "The Bristowe Tragedie," in
the common ballad stanza, and said by Tyrwhitt to be founded on an
historical fact: the excecution at Bristol, in 1461, of Sir Baldwin
Fulford, who fought on the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses.
The best quality in Chatterton's verse is its unexpectedness,--sudden
epithets or whole lines, of a wild and artless sweetness,--which goes far
to explain the fascination that he exercised over Coleridge and Keats. I
mean such touches as these:

"Once as I dozing in the witch-hour lay."

"Brown as the filbert dropping from the shell."

"My gorme emblanched with the comfreie plant."

"Where thou may'st here the sweete night-lark chant,
Or with some mocking brooklet sweetly glide."

"Upon his bloody carnage-house he lay,
Whilst his long shield did gleam with the sun's rising ray."

"The red y-painted oars from the black tide,
Carved with devices rare, do shimmering rise."

"As elfin fairies, when the moon shines bright,
In little circles dance upon the green;
All living creatures fly far from their sight,
Nor by the race of destiny be seen;
For what he be that elfin fairies strike,
Their souls will wander to King Offa's dyke."

The charming wildness of Chatterton's imagination--which attracted the
notice of that strange, visionary genius William Blake[24]--is perhaps
seen at its best in one of the minstrel songs in "Aella." This is
obviously an echo of Ophelia's song in "Hamlet," but Chatterton gives it
a weird turn of his own:

"Hark! the raven flaps his wing
In the briared dell below;
Hark! the death owl loud doth sing
To the nightmares, as they go.
My love is dead.
Gone to his death-bed
Al