bbed and convulsive bombast, of stiff and
tortuous exuberance, that the reader in struggling through some of the
scenes and speeches feels as though he were compelled to push his way
through a cactus hedge: the hot and heavy blossoms of rhetoric blaze and
glare out of a thickset fence of jagged barbarisms and exotic
monstrosities of metaphor. The straining and sputtering declamation of
narrative and oratory scarcely succeeds in expressing through a dozen
quaint and far-fetched words or phrases what two or three of the
simplest would easily and amply have sufficed to convey. But when the
poet is content to deliver his message like a man of this world, we
discover with mingled satisfaction, astonishment, and irritation that he
can write when he pleases in a style of the purest and noblest
simplicity; that he can make his characters converse in a language
worthy of Sophocles when he does not prefer to make them stutter in a
dialect worthy of Lycophron. And in the tragedy of "Sophonisba" the
display of this happy capacity is happily reserved for the crowning
scene of the poem. It would be difficult to find anywhere a 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 honor and just faith
Are most true gods, which we should much adore--
With even disdainful vigor 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 dialogu