Page:Poems and ballads (IA poemsballads00swinrich).pdf/3

 ATALANTA. By

ALGERNON

C.

Ecap. 8vo,

SWINBURNE.

cloth, 6s.

John Camden Hotten.

OPINIONS OF THE '

PRESS.

He

has produced a dramatic poem which abounds from the first page to the last in the finest constituents of poetry—in imagination, fancy, feeling, sentiment, passion, and knowledge of the human heart and soul, combined with a dominant mastery over every species of verse, from the stateliest pomp He has something of of epic metre to the fluent sweetness of song.

...

that creative force which all great poets have had, whether they were Greek, Italian, or English— a native and inborn strength, which scholarship may mould, but can never originate. If, as we are given to understand, Mr. Swinburne is a young writer, we do not hesitate to assert that his volume is extraordinary, not simply for strength and vividness of imagination, but (what is more remarkable with inexperience) for maturity of power, for completeness of self-control, for absolute mastery over the turbulent forces of adolescent genius. . . . That strange, sad, hopeless mood in which the ancient Greek regarded the mysteries of life and death—that austere setting

far

of the soul against the iron will of Destiny which is so full of an immense that divinely sorrowful despair of things which can dignity and pathos suffer to the miserable end, and sees no after compensation, and yet goes down to death in majesty, and beauty, and power— these characteristics of

—

the old Greek faith, or want of faith, or whatsoever we may call it, are reflected by Mr. Swinburne with amazing truth and discrimination. There are from the very roots of human passages in his poem which seem to wring experience the sharpest extract of our griefs."—London

Review,

8th April,

1865.

" Mr. Swinburne has judged well in his choice of a subject. The legend of is one of the most beautiful in the whole compass of the Greek mywithout any of those thology fresh, simple, romantic, solemn, and pathetic, yet horrors which shock us in the stories of Thebes or Argos—no Jocasta, no Calydon



out in the Thyestes, but figures full of heroic truth and nobleness, standing A careful study clear bright light of the early morning of Greece. to and their him to catch reproduce manner, of the Attic dramatists has enabled

...

felicitously

many

of their turns of expression.

The

scholar

is

struck, every few