ABSTRACT
On the whole, these poems will add no additional sprig to the wreath the poet had won before. They have most of his faults, his exaggeration, his carelessness, his obsolete expressions, his inapplicable epithets, his disjointed numbers, his fanciful analogies, and his mythological subjects, which, to be interesting, must call up an audience that have been departed from earth these two thousand years and more. We can believe that Keats might have gained a circle of auditors while reciting his Odes at the Isthian games, or at a symposium at the Piraeus; but other subjects, and other interests, and other creeds, have succeeded, and an English poet must write for London, not for Athens. What Greek would have read Sophocles and Pindar if they had chosen for their poetical subjects, not their own deities and their own heroes, but had gone to Egypt, and the Pyramids, and the Nile, and brought back histories of Anubis, and Osiris, and Osymandyas, and Amunoph the Second, and Thothrun the Third, and all the crocodile-headed monarchs of Hecatompylos?
