hey are, indeed, not so much poems as
collections of hints, from each of which the reader is to make out a
poem for himself. Every epithet is a text for a stanza.

The Comus and the Samson Agonistes are works which, though of very
different merit, offer some marked points of resemblance. Both are lyric
poems in the form of plays. There are perhaps no two kinds of
composition so essentially dissimilar as the drama and the ode. The
business of the dramatist is to keep himself out of sight, and to let
nothing appear but his characters. As soon as he attracts notice to his
personal feelings, the illusion is broken. The effect is as unpleasant
as that which is produced on the stage by the voice of a prompter or the
entrance of a scene-shifter. Hence it was that the tragedies of Byron
were his least successful performances. They resemble those pasteboard
pictures invented by the friend of children, Mr. Newbery, in which a
single movable head goes round twenty different bodies, so that the same
face looks out upon us successively, from the uniform of a hussar, the
furs of a judge, and the rags of a beggar. In all the characters,
patriots and tyrants, haters and lovers, the frown and sneer of Harold
were discernible in an instant. But this species of egotism, though
fatal to the drama, is the inspiration of the ode. It is the part of the
lyric poet to abandon himself, without reserve, to his own emotions.

Between these hostile elements many great men have endeavored to effect
an amalgamation, but never with complete success. The Greek drama, on
the model of which the Samson was written, sprang from the ode. The
dialogue was ingrafted on the chorus, and naturally partook of its
character. The genius of the greatest of the Athenian dramatists
co-operated with the circumstances under which tragedy made its first
appearance. Aeschylus was, head and heart, a lyric poet. In his time,
the Greeks had far more intercourse with the East than in the days of
Homer; and they had not yet acquired that immense superiority in war, in
science, and in the arts, which, in the following generation, led them
to treat the Asiatics with contempt. From the narrative of Herodotus it
should seem that they still looked up, with the veneration of disciples,
to Egypt and Assyria. At this period, accordingly, it was natural that
the literature of Greece should be tinctured with the Oriental style.
And that style, we think, is discernible in the works of Pi