These thoughts suddenly become intolerable. A second fit of madness, wilder than the first, drives the man about the town like a tornado. Finally and impressively comes the contrast between the drunkard's horrible mirth and the sudden calm in his mind when the tall pale Quakeress hypnotizes him with conviction of sin. She drives out the devils from his breast with quiet authority, and the peace of God enters into his soul. From the first word of the poem to the last the man's own attitude toward fighting, drink, and religion is logically sustained. It is perfect drama, with never a false note. The hero is one of the "twice-born men," and the work may fairly be taken as one more footnote to the varieties of religious experience. I have been told on good authority that of all his writings Mr. Masefield prefers _Nan_, _The Widow in the Bye Street_, and _The Everlasting Mercy_. I think he is right. In these productions he has no real competitors. They are his most original, most vivid, most powerful pieces. He is at his best when he has a story to tell, and can tell it freely in his own unhampered way, a combination of drama and narrative. In _The Everlasting Mercy_, written in octosyllabics, the metre of _Christmas Eve_, he is unflinchingly realistic, as Browning was in describing the chapel. The _Athenaeum_ thought Browning ought not to write about the mysteries of the Christian faith in doggerel. But _Christmas Eve_ is not doggerel. It is simply the application of the rules of realism to a discussion of religion. It may lack the dignity of the _Essay on Man_, but it is more interesting because it is more definite, more concrete, more real. In _The Everlasting Mercy_ we have beautiful passages of description, sharply exciting narration, while the dramatic element is furnished by conversation--and what conversation! It differs from ordinary poetry as the sermons of an evangelist differ from the sermons of Bishops. Mr. Masefield is a natural-born dramatist. He is never content to describe his characters; he makes them talk, and talk their own language, and you will never go far in his longer poems without seeing the characters rise from the page, spring into life, and immediately you hear their voices raised in angry altercation. It is as though he felt the reality of his men and women so keenly that he cannot keep them down. They refuse to remain quiet. They insist on taking the poem into their own hands, and running away with it. When we are reading _The Widow in the Bye Street_ we realize that Mr. Masefield has studied with some profit the art of narrative verse as displayed by Chaucer. The story begins directly, and many necessary facts are revealed in the first stanza, in a manner so simple that for the moment we forget that this apparent simplicity is artistic excellence. The _Nun's Priest's Tale_ is a model of attack.