Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/133

 more preposterous or disjointed piece of jargon than the speech of Asdrubal at the close of the second act:—

Brook open scorn, faint powers!— Make good the camp!—No, fly!—yes, what?—wild rage!— To be a prosperous villain! yet some heat, some hold; But to burn temples, and yet freeze, O cold! Give me some health; now your blood sinks: thus deeds Ill nourished rot: without Jove nought succeeds.

And yet this passage occurs in a poem which contains such a passage as the following:—

And now with undismayed resolve behold, To save you—you—for honour and just faith Are most true gods, which we should much adore— With even disdainful vigour I give up An abhorred life!—You have been good to me, And I do thank thee, heaven. O my stars, I bless your goodness, that with breast unstained, Faith pure, a virgin wife, tried to my glory, I die, of female faith the long-lived story; Secure from bondage and all servile harms, But more, most happy in my husband's arms.

The lofty sweetness, the proud pathos, the sonorous simplicity of these most noble verses might scarcely suffice to attest the poet's possession of any strong dramatic faculty. But the scene immediately preceding bears evidence of a capacity for terse and rigorous brevity of dialogue