_Poems._ By OWEN MEREDITH. The Wanderer and Clytemnestra. Boston:
Ticknor & Fields. 18mo.

The author of these poems is Robert Bulwer Lytton, the son of the
eminent novelist. Though still very young, he has reached the honor of
being arrayed in Ticknor and Fields's "blue and gold," the paradisiacal
condition of contemporary poets; and his works occupy, in words, though
not in matter, as much space as Tennyson's. The volume includes all the
poems which Lytton has published up to the present time. The general
characteristics of his Muse are fluency, fancy, melody, and sensibility.
The diligent reader will detect, throughout the volume, the traces of
the author's sympathy with other poets, especially Tennyson, and,
amid all the opulence of expression and intensity of feeling, will be
sensible of the lack of decided original genius and character. There is
evidence of intellect and imagination, but they are at present tossed
somewhat wildly about in a tumult of sensations and passions, and have
not yet mastered their instruments. But the poems, as they are the
product of a young man, so they possess all the attractions which allure
young readers. It would not be surprising, if they obtained a popularity
equal to those of Alexander Smith; for they give even more musical
utterance to the loves, hopes, exultations, regrets, and despairs of
youth, and indicate the same hot blood. They are also characterized by
similar vagueness of thought and vividness of fancy, in those passages
where sensibility turns theorist and philosophizes on its gratified or
battled sensations,--while they generally evince wider culture, larger
superficial experience of life, a more controlling sense of the
beautiful, and an equal facility of self-abandonment to the passion of
the moment.

Leaving out those poems which are repetitions or imitations, a thin