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Here, if not a full-fledged poet, is at least no mere unfledged poetaster. If not already great in performance, the poetry of Owen Meredith is great in promise. Young he evidently is, and his verses are not exempt from the liabilities of youth: but that is a kind of fault which every day will, or ought to, mend; and if the present minstrel's strains show in no scant measure the unripeness of youth, its lack of restraint, of discipline, of chastened judgment, so do they its energy, its glow, the large hope which belongs to life's dawn, the rich fancy which to itself a kingdom is. He is thoughtful, and gives to his thoughts a serious, earnest expression; a tender pathos frequently marks his lines, of ample power to soften and subdue; vigour is not wanting, on occasion, even of a dramatic order; he is a close and loving student of Nature and her works, her landscapes, her sea-changes, her skyey influences; and he has an ear for the music of rhythm and metrical variations, something over-fond perhaps of the free and adventurous in this line of things.
"Clytemnestra" may be pronounced a dashingly "grand junction" of the Classical and the Romantic in tragic art. In much keeping pretty close to Æschylus, it is suffused with the glow and colouring of post-Shakspearian times. It has choruses, dialogues, and phrases that in form may be thought almost too literally Grecian, but in spirit they belong to an age which has been sung to by Keats and Shelley, Tennyson and the Brownings. "Clytemnestra" is incomparably more spirited, powerful, and impressive an imitation of the old Attic type—more free in movement, striking in situation, and rich in composition—than we remember to have seen this many a day in any production of the kind. Clytemnestra herself, a gorgeous tragedy queen, in sceptred pall comes sweeping by, majestic, strong of will, and hot of passion;—the Clytemnestra of Æschylus, it has been said by Schlegel, could not with propriety have been portrayed as a frail seduced woman, but must appear with the features of the heroic age, so rife with bloody catastrophes, in which all passions were vehement, and men, both the good and the bad, surpassed the ordinary standard of later and un-heroic ages: and after this AEschylean type is moulded this new impersonation of the royal regicide. Ægisthus, beside her, is a very foil to set off her energies to the utmost—a puny sinner, whose ambitions, purposes, resolves, passions, beside hers,
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.
He cringes before her as she wooes him, aghast at her power over his fluttering, abject soul, and sees in her a godlike fiend, in whose eyes heaven and hell seem meeting, and who owns and plies a spell to sway the inmost courses of his soul. She can reproach the gods for fashioning
- ↑ Clytemnestra, The Earl's Return, The Artist, and other Poems. By Owen Meredith. London: Chapman and Hall. 1855.
