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Its subject is connected with that of Gray's Descent of Odin, but handled much more fully, and in blank-verse narrative instead of ballad form. The story, like most of those in Norse mythology, has great capabilities; but it may be questioned whether the Greek-Miltonic chastened style which the poet affects is well calculated to bring them out.
"Shall I read you some of the rhymed pieces first, or some of the blank-verse poems, sir?" Gifted asked. "Read what you think is best, a specimen of your first-class style of composition."
He had a high sense of duty, was a prominent and patriotic citizen, and enjoyed the esteem and even the reverence of his fellow-countrymen. B. also produced a blank-verse translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Bibliographer and genealogist, ed. at Camb., was called to the Bar in 1787. He was made a baronet in 1814. He d. at Geneva.
"Then why are you spending Christmas with them?" "I reviewed a ridiculous blank-verse tragedy written by Deverill on the Death of Sennacherib. Historically it was puerile. I said so in no measured terms. He wrote a letter claiming to be a poet and not an archæologist. I replied that the day had passed when poets could with impunity commit the abominable crime of distorting history.
While in Paris he completed his blank-verse play, "The Duchess of Padua," and sent it to Miss Mary Anderson in America, who refused it, although she had commissioned him, he always said, to write it. It seems to me inferior even to "Vera" in interest, more academic and further from life, and when produced in New York in 1891 it was a complete frost.
Every change of convention on the part of the author demands a corresponding change in the actor. Clearly, he must speak verse differently from prose, though there are foes to poetry who beg him to break up the lines and defeat the efforts of the poet; and he must adopt a manner in a blank-verse tragedy unsuitable to a play by Mr Barrie. Moreover, he ought to aim at seeming natural in both.
The blank-verse tail-piece is finer still in execution; it is, with the still finer companion-coda of Sohrab and Rustum, the author's masterpiece in the kind, and it is, like that, an early and consummate example of Mr Arnold's favourite device of finishing without a finish, of "playing out the audience," so to speak, with something healing and reconciling, description, simile, what not, to relieve the strain of his generally sad philosophy and his often melancholy themes.
"Why but the explaining of that would be to offer you my opinion about the book " "I should be very pleased to hear it. Your reason for declining it, then, is not altogether that it is a blank-verse drama?" "Not altogether, Mr. Stirling. It's a little difficult for me to tell you about these things, you know.
Many and many a time, when the youngsters have started to guy me unmercifully I've fairly ached to jump in and thrash 'em all. But, instead, I've tried to conquer myself!" "I reckon you're the same old Dave improved," murmured Midshipman Dalzell, holding out his hand. "On your head, mister. Now, let us have paragraph number four, with tragic, blank-verse effect." That was Jennison's command
Nor do good blank-verse translators give in to it. Cowper does not in his Iliad, nor Lord Derby, nor Mr. Bryant in his version of the fifth book of the Odyssey, nor Mr. Carey in his Dante. Permissible at times in dramatic blank verse, it is in epic rejected by the best artists as a weakness. Can it be that Mr. Longfellow hereby aims to be more close to the form of Dante?
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