Many of these songs, so natural, fresh, and spontaneous, together with sonnets and other more elaborate forms of lyrical verse, were printed in miscellanies, such as the _Passionate Pilgrim, England's Helicon_, and Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_. Some were anonymous, or were by poets of whom little more is known than their names. Others were by well-known writers, and others, again, were strewn through the plays of Lyly, Shakspere, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and other dramatists. Series of love sonnets, like Spenser's _Amoretti_ and Sidney's _Astrophel and Stella_, were written by Shakspere, Daniel, Drayton, Drummond, Constable, Watson, and others, all dedicated to some mistress real or imaginary. Pastorals, too, were written in great number, such as William Browne's _Britannia's Pastorals_ and _Shepherd's Pipe_ (1613-1616) and Marlowe's charmingly rococo little idyl, _The Passionate Shepherd to his Love_, which Shakspere quoted in the _Merry Wives of Windsor_, and to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a reply. There were love stories in verse, like Arthur Brooke's _Romeo and Juliet_ (the source of Shakspere's tragedy), Marlowe's fragment, _Hero and Leander_, and Shakspere's _Venus and Adonis_, and _Rape of Lucrece_, the first of these on an Italian and the other three on classical subjects, though handled in any thing but a classical manner. Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere, that he "could not have written an epic: he would have died of a plethora of thought." Shakspere's two narrative poems, indeed, are by no means models of their kind. The current of the story is choked at every turn, though it be with golden sand. It is significant of his dramatic habit of mind that dialogue and soliloquy usurp the place of narration, and that, in the _Rape of Lucrece_ especially, the poet lingers over the analysis of motives and feelings, instead of hastening on with the action, as Chaucer, or any born story-teller, would have done. 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.]