The Rowley poems include, among other things, a number of dramatic or quasi-dramatic pieces, "Goddwyn," "The Tournament," "The Parliament of Sprites"; the narrative poem of "The Battle of Hastings," and a collection of "eclogues." These are all in long-stanza forms, mostly in the ten-lined stanza. "English Metamorphosis" is an imitation of a passage in "The Faerie Queene," (book ii. canto x. stanzas 5-19). "The Parliament of Sprites" is an interlude played by Carmelite friars at William Canynge's house on the occasion of the dedication of St. Mary Redcliffe's. One after another the _antichi spiriti dolenti_ rise up and salute the new edifice: Nimrod and the Assyrians, Anglo-Saxon ealdormen and Norman knights 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: