Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/129

 clearly in its verse and manner. These are the three long poems.

We turn from these long poems, for which his genius was unfitted, for he had not the capacity of either copious or continuous invention, to the lyric and elegiac poems in which his genius is at its best, and in which—unlike those already discussed—the subjects have carried him away from himself. A few of them belong to the Greek cycle of tales, a region where he loved to dwell.

He tried to write a tragedy in the manner of the Greek drama on the subject of Merope. It really is a failure. Its worst fault is dulness, and though he strove hard to make a great moral impression emerge through the action of the drama, and leave its power on the audience—an end his friend Sophocles desired—he did not succeed in this because the action of his play had not enough of life in it. "Good wine needs no bush," we say when we read his long, interesting, explanatory preface; but here is an enormous sign hung out over the tavern door to lead us to try the wine. The landlord must have himself doubted its quality.

The songs, or rather the recitations, of Callicles, published in 1855 under the title of the Harp-Player on Ætna, are pleasant, but only one of them—Cadmus and Harmonia—is of the finest quality. Philomela, which recalls the old sad tale of the palace in the Thracian vale, is half English, half Greek, and full of