Born, at Chichester, 25 Dec. 1721. Probably educated first at Chichester. Scholar of Winchester College, 19 Jan. 1733. Contributed verses to “Gentleman’s Magazine” (Jan. and Oct. 1739), while still at school. Matriculated at Queen’s College, Oxford, 22 March 1740; Demyship at Magdalen College, 29 July 1741; B.A., 18 Nov. 1743. Visit to uncle in Flanders. Thought of entertaining Army or Church, but eventually devoted himself to literature in London. Failing health; visit to France, lived with sister at Chichester on his return. For a time in a madhouse at Chelsea. Visit to Oxford, 1754. Died at Chichester, 12 June 1759. Buried, at St. Andrew’s Church, Chichester. Works: “Persian Eclogues” (anon.), 1742 (another edn., anon., entitled “Oriental Eclogues,” 1757); “Odes,” 1747 [1746]; “Verses humbly addressed to Sir Thomas Hammer” (anon.), 1743. Posthumous: “An Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands,” 1788. Collected Works: ed. by Langhorne, with Life, 1765, etc.; ed. by Mrs. Barbauld, 1797; ed. by A. Dyce, 1827; ed. by Moy Thomas, with Life, 1858.

Personal

	Ye who the merits of the dead revere,
	Who hold misfortune sacred, genius dear,
	Regard this tomb, where Collins, hapless name,
	Solicits kindness with a double claim.
	Though nature gave him, and though science taught
	The fire of fancy, and the reach of thought,
	Severely doomed to penury’s extreme,
	He pass’d in maddening pain life’s feverish dream,
	While rays of genius only served to show
	The thickening horror, and exalt his woe.
	Ye walls that echoed to his frantic moan,
	Guard the due records of this grateful stone;
	Strangers to him, enamoured of his lays,
	This fond memorial to his talents raise.
	For this the ashes of a bard require,
	Who touched the tenderest notes of pity’s lyre;
	Who joined pure faith to strong poetic powers;
	Who, in reviving reason’s lucid hours,
	Sought on one book his troubled mind to rest,
	And rightly deemed the book of God the best.

  How little can we venture to exult in any intellectual powers or literary attainments, when we consider the condition of poor Collins. I knew him a few years ago, full of hopes and full of projects, versed in many languages, high in fancy, and strong in retention. This busy and forcible mind is now under the government of those who lately would not have been able to comprehend the least and most narrow of its designs. What do you hear of him? are there hopes of his recovery? or is he to pass the remainder of his life in misery and degradation? perhaps with complete consciousness of his calamity.

  The neglected author of the Persian eclogues, which, however inaccurate, excel any in our language, is still alive. Happy, if insensible of our neglect, not raging at our ingratitude.

  In stature somewhat above the middle size; of a “brown” complexion, keen expressive eyes, and a fixed sedate aspect, which from intense thinking had contracted an habitual frown.

  William Collins, the poet, I was intimately acquainted with, from the time he came to reside at Oxford…. As he brought with him, for so the whole turn of his conversation discovered, too high an opinion of his school acquisitions, and a sovereign contempt for all academic studies and discipline, he never looked with any complacency on his situation in the university, but was always complaining of the dulness of a college life…. When poverty overtook him, poor man, he had too much sensibility of temper to bear with his misfortunes, and so fell into a most deplorable state of mind. How he got down to Oxford, I do not know; but I myself saw him under Merton wall, in a very affected situation, struggling, and conveyed by force, in the arms of two or three men, towards the parish of St. Clement, in which was a house that took in such unhappy objects; and I always understood that, not long after, he died in confinement; but when, or where, or where he was buried, I never knew. Thus was lost to the world this unfortunate person, in the prime of life, without availing himself of fine abilities, which, properly improved, must have raised him to the top of any profession, and have rendered him a blessing to his friends, and an ornament to his country. Without books, or steadiness or resolution to consult them if he had been possessed of any, he was always planning schemes for elaborate publications, which were carried no farther than the drawing up of proposals for subscriptions, some of which were published; and in particular, as far as I remember, one for a “History of the Darker Ages.” He was passionately fond of music; good natured and affable; warm in his friendships, and visionary in his pursuits; and, as long as I knew him, very temperate in his eating and drinking. He was of moderate stature, of a light and clear complexion, with grey eyes, so very weak at times as hardly to bear a candle in the room; and often raising within him apprehensions of blindness.

  He was an acceptable companion everywhere; and, among the gentlemen who loved him for a genius, I may reckon the Doctors Armstrong, Barrowby, and Hill, Messrs. Quin, Garrick, and Foote, who frequently took his opinion on their pieces before they were seen by the public. He was particularly noticed by the geniuses who frequented the Bedford and Slaughter’s Coffee Houses. From his knowledge of Garrick he had the liberty of the scenes and green-room, where he made diverting observations on the vanity and false consequence of that class of people; and his manner of relating them to his particular friends was extremely entertaining.

  In illustration of what Dr. Johnson has related, that during his last malady he was a great reader of the Bible, I am favoured with the following anecdote from the Reverend Mr. Shenton, Vicar of St. Andrews, at Chichester, by whom Collins was buried: “Walking in my vicaral garden one Sunday evening, during Collins’s last illness, I heard a female (the servant, I suppose) reading the Bible in his chamber. Mr. Collins had been accustomed to rave much, and make great moanings; but while she was reading, or rather attempting to read, he was not only silent but attentive likewise, correcting her mistakes, which indeed were very frequent, through the whole of the twenty-seventh chapter of Genesis.” I have just been informed, from undoubted authority, that Collins has finished a “Preliminary Dissertation” to be prefixed to his “History of the Restoration of Learning,” and that it was written with great judgment, precision, and knowledge of the subject.

  I have lately finished eight volumes of Johnson’s “Prefaces, or Lives of the Poets.” In all the number I observe but one man—(a poet of no great fame,—of whom I did not know that he existed till I found him there), whose mind seems to have had the slightest tincture of religion; and he was hardly in his senses. His name was Collins. He sunk into a state of melancholy, and died young. Not long before his death, he was found at his lodgings in Islington by his biographer, with the New Testament in his hand. He said to Johnson, “I have but one book; but it is the best.” Of him, therefore, there are some hopes.

	Glide gently, thus for ever glide,
	O Thames! that other bards may see
	As lovely visions by thy side
	As now, fair river! come to me.
	O glide, fair stream! for ever so,
	Thy quiet soul on all bestowing,
	Till all our minds for ever flow
	As thy deep waters now are flowing.
	Vain thought!—Yet be as now thou art,
	That in thy waters may be seen
	The image of a poet’s heart,
	How bright, how solemn, how serene!
	Such as did once the Poet bless,
	Who murmuring here a later ditty,
	Could find no refuge from distress
	But in the milder grief of pity.
	Now let us, as we float along,
	For him suspend the dashing oar;
	And pray that never child of song
	May know that Poet’s sorrows more.
	How calm! how still! the only sound,
	The dripping of the oar suspended!
	—The evening darkness gathers round
	By virtue’s holiest Powers attended.

  What was the result of his literary life? He returned to his native city of Chichester in a state almost of nakedness, destitute, diseased, and wild in despair, to hide himself in the arms of a sister…. At Chichester, tradition has preserved some striking and affecting occurrences of his last days; he would haunt the aisles and cloisters of the cathedral, roving days and nights together, loving their

Dim religious light.

And, when the choristers chanted their anthem, the listening and bewildered poet, carried out of himself by the solemn strains, and his own too susceptible imagination, moaned and shrieked, and awoke a sadness and a terror most affecting amid religious emotions; their friend, their kinsman, and their poet, was before them, an awful image of human misery and ruined genius!

  He wrote an “Ode on the Passions,” in which, after dwelling on Hope, Fear, Anger, Despair, Pity, and describing them with many picturesque circumstances, he dismisses Love with a couple of lines, as dancing to the sound of the sprightly viol, and forming with joy the light fantastic round. Such was Collins’ idea of love!

  Collins’s person was of the middle size and well formed; of a light complexion, with gray, weak eyes. His mind was deeply imbued with classical literature, and he understood the Italian, French, and Spanish languages. He was well read, and was particularly conversant with early English writers, and to an ardent love of literature he united, as is manifest from many of his pieces, a passionate devotion to Music, that

	“———Sphere-descended maid,
	Friend of Pleasure, Wisdom’s aid.”

  Much speculation has taken place as to the causes of Collins’s irresolution; but human motives are not easily determined. The evidences are too many to doubt, that he was at this time indolent and undecided; but fond of pleasure and eager for excitement. His truest friend has spoken of habits of dissipation and long association with “fortuitous companions.” But his studies were extensive, and his scholarship commanded the respect of learned men. As with his friends the Wartons, his taste led him to the study of the older English writers. He was acquainted with the riches of the Elizabethan poets at a time when few English students strayed beyond Cowley; and he read in the Italian, French, and Spanish languages those poems and romances which, to the more sober taste of Johnson, “passed the bounds of nature.” At this time he composed his Odes, upon which his fame rests.

Persian Eclogues, 1742

  The following eclogues, written by Mr. Collins, are very pretty; the images, it must be owned, are not very local; for the pastoral subject could not well admit of it. The description of Asiatic magnificence and manners is a subject as yet unattempted amongst us, and, I believe, capable of furnishing a great variety of poetical imagery.

  Mr. Collins wrote his Eclogues when he was about seventeen years old, at Winchester school, and, as I well remember, had been just reading that volume of Salmon’s Modern History which described Persia; which determined him to lay the scene of these pieces, as being productive of new images and sentiments. In his maturer years he was accustomed to speak very contemptuously of them, calling them his Irish Eclogues, and saying they had not in them one spark of Orientalism; and desiring me to erase a motto he had prefixed to them in a copy he gave me:

	—quos primus equis oriens afflavit anhelis.—
	Virg.

He was greatly mortified that they found more readers and admirers than his Odes.

  His “Hassan, or the Camel-Driver,” is, I verily believe, one of the most tenderly sublime, most sweetly descriptive poems in the cabinet of the Muses.

  Collins published his “Oriental Eclogues” while at college, and his lyrical poetry at the age of twenty-six. Those works will abide comparison with whatever Milton wrote under the age of thirty. If they have rather less exuberant wealth of genius, they exhibit more exquisite touches of pathos. Like Milton, he leads us into the haunted ground of imagination; like him, he has the rich economy of expression haloed with thought, which by a single few words often hints entire pictures to the imagination…. The pastoral eclogue, which is insipid in all other English hands, assumes in his a touching interest, and a picturesque air of novelty. It seems that he himself ultimately undervalued those eclogues, as deficient in characteristic manners; but surely no just reader of them cares any more about this circumstance than about the authenticity of the tale of Troy.

  Although he has so exquisitely described the Passions, the greatest want of his poetry is passion. He has the highest enthusiasm, but little human interest. His figures are warm with the breath of genius, but there is little of the life’s-blood of heart about them. Hence his “Oriental Eclogues,” although full of fine description, are felt to be rather tame and stiff.

  The “Persian Eclogues” have much of the rich and peculiar diction of Collins. He is said, on more than one authority, to have expressed his dissatisfaction with them, by calling them his “Irish Eclogues;” but in this he no doubt simply referred to some remarkable blunders in his first edition.

  For tenderness, simplicity, and grace, must be pronounced as amongst the most beautiful pastoral poetry which we possess.

Ode to Liberty, 1747

  After an overture worthy of Milton’s or of Handel’s “Agonistes,” a prelude that peals as from beneath the triumphal hand of the thunder-bearer, steadily subsides through many noble but ever less and less noble verses, towards a final couplet showing not so much the flatness of failure as the prostration of collapse.

Ode to Evening

  In his address to Evening, he has presented us with the first fortunate specimen of the blank ode. Nothing but his own ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland can exceed the fine enthusiasm of this piece; the very spirit of Poussin and Claude breathe throughout the whole, mingled indeed with a wilder and more visionary train of idea, yet subdued and chastened by the softest tones of melancholy.

  If Collins live by the reputation of one, more than of another, performance, it strikes me that his “Ode to Evening” will be that on which the voice of posterity will be more uniform in praise. It is a pearl of the most perfect tint and shape.

  His “Ode to Evening” is, perhaps, the most original of his odes. The fine tone of tranquil musing that pervades it is felt by every poetic reader. A subdued and peaceful spirit breathes through it, as in the solitude and stillness of a twilight country. The absence of rhyme leaving the even glow of the verse unbroken, and the change at the end of each stanza into shorter lines, as if the voice of the reader dropped into a lower key, contribute to the effect. To those who feel its spirit the living world is far away, and even the objects in the surrounding landscape, by which the picture is completed, are seen only in their reflection in the poet’s mind. The bat and the beetle which are abroad in the dusky air; the brown hamlets and dim-discovered spires; the springs that have a solemn murmur, and the dying gales, are but images of that rapt and peaceful mood. It must, however, be acknowledged that some obscurity in the invocation arises from the long inversion of the sense, by which that which in logical order is the first sentence in the poem is carried over to the last two lines of the fourth stanza.

  The most perfect and original poem of Collins, as well as the most finely appreciative of Nature, is his Ode to Evening. No doubt evening is personified in his address as “maid composed,” and “calm votaress,” but the personification is so delicately handled, and in so subdued a tone, that it does not jar on the feelings, as such personifications too often do…. There is about the whole ode a subdued twilight tone, a remoteness from men and human things, and a pensive evening musing, all the more expressive, because it does not shape itself into definite thoughts, but reposes in appropriate images.

  Displays a sustained power of painting landscape effects which Collins does not repeat elsewhere.

  Collins is best known by his Ode on “The Passions,” but incomparably his finest and most distinctive work is the “Ode to Evening.” The superior popularity of “The Passions” is easily explained. It might be recited at a penny reading, and every line of its strenuous rhetoric would tell; every touch would be at once appreciated. But the beauties of the “Ode to Evening” are of a much stronger kind, and the structure of it is infinitely more complicated…. It is a poem to be taken into the mind slowly; you cannot take possession of it without effort. Give a quiet evening to it; return to it again and again; master the meaning of it deliberately part by part, and let the whole sink into your mind softly and gradually, and you will not regret the labor. You will find yourselves in possession of a perpetual delight, of a music that will make the fall of evening forever charming to you.

The Passions

  “The Ode to the Passions” is, by universal consent, the noblest of Collins’s productions, because it exhibits a much more extended invention, not of one passion only, but of all the passions combined, acting, according to the powers of each, to one end. The execution, also, is the happiest, each particular passion is drawn with inimitable force and compression. Let us take on Fear and Despair, each dashed out in four lines, of which every word is like inspiration. Beautiful as Spenser is, and sometimes sublime, yet he redoubles his touch too much, and often introduces some coarse feature or expression, which destroys the spell. Spenser, indeed, has other merits of splendid and inexhaustible invention, which render it impossible to put Collins on a par with him: but we must not estimate merit by mere quantity: if a poet produces but one short piece, which is perfect, he must be placed according to its quality. And surely there is not a single figure in Collins’s “Ode to the Passions” which is not perfect, both in conception and language. He has had many imitators, but no one has ever approached him in his own department.

  All that Collins has written is full of imagination, pathos, and melody. The defect of his poetry in general is that there is too little of earth in it: in the purity and depth of its beauty it resembles the bright blue sky. Yet Collins had genius enough for anything; and in his ode entitled “The Passions,” he has shown with how strong a voice and pulse of humanity he could, when he chose, animate his verse, and what extensive and enduring popularity he could command.

  Its grace and vigour, its vivid and pliant dexterity of touch, are worthy of all their long inheritance of praise; and altogether it holds out admirably well to the happy and harmonious end.

General

  In simplicity of description and expression, in delicacy and softness of numbers, and in natural and unaffected tenderness, they are not to be equalled by anything of the pastoral kind in the English language.

	Attempt no number of the plaintive Gay,
	Let me like midnight cats, or Collins sing.

  His diction was often harsh, unskilfully laboured, and injudiciously selected. He affected the obsolete, when it was not worthy of revival; and he puts his words out of the common order, seeming to think, with some later candidates for fame, that not to write prose is certainly to write poetry. His lines commonly are of slow motion, clogged and impeded with clusters of consonants. As men are often esteemed who cannot be loved, so the poetry of Collins may sometimes extort praise when it gives little-pleasure.

  One of our most exquisite poets, and of whom, perhaps, without exaggeration it may be asserted, that he partook of the credulity and enthusiasm of Tasso, the magic wildness of Shakspeare, the sublimity of Milton, and the pathos of Ossian.

	There was Collins, ’tis true, had a good deal to say,
	But the dog had no industry.

	Like Collins, ill-starr’d name!
	Whose lay’s requital was that tardy Fame,
	Who bound no laurel round his living head,
	Should hang it o’er his monument when dead.

  He had that true vivida vis, that genuine inspiration, which alone can give birth to the highest efforts of poetry. He leaves stings in the minds of his readers, certain traces of thought and feeling, which never wear out, because nature had left them in his own mind. He is the only one of the minor poets of whom, if he had lived, it cannot be said that he might not have done the greatest things. The germ is there. He is sometimes affected, unmeaning and obscure; but he also catches rich glimpses of the bowers of Paradise, and has lofty aspirations after the highest seats of the Muses. With a great deal of tinsel and splendid patchwork, he has not been able to hide the solid sterling ore of genius. In his best works there is an attic simplicity, a pathos, and fervour of imagination, which make us the more lament that the efforts of his mind were at first depressed by neglect and pecuniary embarrassment, and at length buried in the gloom of an unconquerable and fatal malady…. I should conceive that Collins had a much greater poetical genius than Gray: he had more of that fine madness which is inseparable from it, of its turbid effervescence, of all that pushes it to the verge of agony or rapture.

  The most accomplished Scholar, and the most original Poet of his age.

  It is not, however, inconsistent with a high respect for Collins, to ascribe every possible praise to that unrivaled production, the “Ode to the Passions,” to feel deeply the beauty, the pathos, and the sublime conceptions of the Odes to Evening, to Pity, to Simplicity, and a few others, and yet to be sensible of the occasional obscurity and imperfections of his imagery in other pieces, to find it difficult to discover the meaning of some passages, to think the opening of four of his odes which commence with the common-place invocation of “O thou,” and the alliteration by which so many lines are disfigured, blemishes too serious to be forgotten, unless the judgment be drowned in the full tide of generous and enthusiastic admiration of the great and extraordinary beauties by which these faults are more than redeemed. That these defects are to be ascribed to haste it would be uncandid to deny; but haste is no apology for such faults in productions which fill a hundred pages, and which their author had ample opportunities to remove.

  When Collins is spoken of as one of the minor poets, it is a sad misapplication of the term. Unless he be minor because the number and size of his poems is small, no one is less a minor poet. In him every word is poetry, and poetry either sublime or pathetic. He does not rise to the sublimity of Milton or Dante, or reach the graceful tenderness of Petrarch; but he has a visionary invention of his own, to which there is no rival. As long as the language lasts, every richly gifted and richly cultivated mind will read him with intense and wondering rapture; and will not cease to entertain the conviction, from his example, if from no other, that true poetry of the higher orders is real inspiration.

  That he should never before have heard of Collins, shows how little Collins has been heard of in his life-time; and that Cowper, in his knowledge of contemporary literature, was now awakening, as it were, from a sleep of twenty years. In the course of those years Collins’s Odes, which were utterly neglected on their first appearance, had obtained their due estimation…. It should also be remembered, that in the course of one generation these poems, without any adventitious aid to bring them into notice, were acknowledged to be the best of their kind in the language. Silently and imperceptibly they had risen by their own buoyancy, and their power was felt by every reader who had any true poetic feeling.

  If we admire the genius and skill which have compressed into the few pages of Gray’s collected poems so many noble images, so many exquisite movements of harmony, and so much splendour and propriety of diction, we shall find that an intense susceptibility for beauty has concentrated into the yet smaller compass of Collins’s productions a quantity and depth of loveliness of a kind even more permanently attractive to the reader. If Gray was the more accomplished artist, Collins was the more born poet. In Collins the first thing we remark is the inimitable felicity of his expression. Gray’s lovely and majestic pictures are careful, genial, artistic paintings of nature; those of Collins are the images of nature in the camera obscura. Gray is the light of day; Collins is the Italian moonlight—as bright almost, but tenderer, more pensive, more spiritual,—

	“Dusk, yet clear;
	Mellow’d and mingling, yet distinctly seen.”

  The Odes of Collins are fuller of the fine and spontaneous enthusiasm of genius, than any other poems ever written by one who wrote so little. We close this tiny volume with the same disappointed surprise, which overcomes us when a harmonious piece of music suddenly ceases unfinished. His range of tones is very wide: it extends from the warmest rapture of self-entranced imagination, to a tenderness which makes some of his verses sound like gentle weeping. The delicacy of gradation with which he passes from thought to thought, has an indescribable charm, though not always unattended by obscurity; and there is a marvellous power of suggestion in his clouds of allegoric imagery, so beautiful in outline, and coloured by a fancy so purely and ideally refined. His most popular poem, “The Passions,” can hardly be allowed to be his best: of some of his most deeply marked characteristics it conveys no adequate idea. Readers who do not shrink from having their attention put to the stretch, and who can relish the finest and most recondite analogies, will delight in his Ode entitled “The Manners,” and in that, still nobler and more imaginative, “On the Poetical Character.” Every one, surely, can understand and feel the beauty of such pieces as the Odes “To Pity,” “To Simplicity,” “To Mercy.” Nor does it require much reflection to fit us for appreciating the spirited lyric “To Liberty;” or for being entranced by the finely-woven harmonies and the sweetly romantic pictures, which, in the “Ode to Evening,” remind us of the youthful poems of Milton.

  With some occasional exaggeration and over-luxuriance, this author’s language is for the most part exquisitely musical and refined.

  There belong to Collins a new intensity of emotion, a vividness of personification, a broader sweep of imagination, which decidedly distinguish his composition from that of his cotemporaries, and impart to the reader a sense of larger, freer, gladder motion. As a vigorous bird proportions his curves of flight to his power of muscle, so Collins adopts a more varied and continuous rhythm. His successive impulses gather up and weave together more lines, and we are borne on the strong wing of a single image through a series of varying melodies, that will not fall apart into brief, measured stanzas.

  What a notion it gives us of the power of poetry that this poor mad-house patient is able at the distance of more than a hundred years to so possess our minds with his own emotion, that we never cease to see amid the skirts of these dim woodlands his retreating figure!

  Without making odious comparisons, it may be fair to say that Collins’s odes are more liked than Gray’s. They have less the air of artificiality, and they have less the form of a mosaic, which is naturally suggested to us by Gray’s borrowing from his predecessors. Where there are traces of labored elegance in Gray, we have often in Collins the apparently swift choice of the right epithet, for he certainly conceals his art…. Collins, however, mastered his instrument, and his odes survive to show that, even in a dreary period of literary history, the man may arise who proves that the poetical tradition, though obscured, is not wholly lost.

  Living both in the age and after an age of critical poetry, Collins, always alien alike from the better and from the worse influences of his day, has shown at least as plentiful a lack of any slightest critical instinct or training as ever did any poet on record, in his epistle to Hanmer on that worthy knight’s “inqualifiable” edition of Shakespeare. But his couplets, though incomparably inferior to Gray’s, are generally spirited and competent as well as fluent and smooth. The direct sincerity and purity of their positive and straightforward inspiration will always keep his poems fresh and sweet to the senses of all men. He was a solitary song-bird among many more or less excellent pipers and pianists. He could put more spirit of colour into a single stroke, more breath of music into a single note, than could all the rest of his generation into all the labours of their lives. And the sweet name and the lucid memory of his genius could only pass away with all relics and all records of lyric poetry in England.

  There are very few poets from whose wheat so little chaff has been winnowed as from that of Collins. His entire existing work does not extend to much more than fifteen hundred lines, at least two-thirds of which must live with the best poetry of the century. Collins has the touch of a sculptor; his verse is clearly-cut and direct; it is marble-pure, but also marble-cold. Each phrase is a wonder of felicitous workmanship, without emphasis, without sense of strain. His best strophes possess an extraordinary quiet melody, a soft harmonious smoothness as of some divine and aerial creature singing in artless, perfect, numbers for its own delight…. The intellectual quality of Collins is not so strongly marked as his pure and polished art; but he had sympathy with fine things unpopular in his own lifetime. He was a republican and a Hellenist and a collector of black-letter poetry, in an age that equally despised what was Greek and what was Gothic. It may perhaps be allowed to be an almost infallible criterion of a man’s taste for the highest forms of poetic art to inquire whether he has or has not a genuine love for the verses of William Collins.

  There is the chink of true and rare poetic metal in his verse, and it is fused by an imagination capable of intense heat and wonderful flame.

  Men like Thomas Gray and William Collins attempted to “revive the just designs of Greece,” not only in fitness of language, but in perfection of form. They are commonly placed together, but the genius of each was essentially different. What they had in common belonged to the age in which they lived, and one of these elements was a certain artificial phrasing from which they found it difficult to escape. Both sought beauty more than their fellows, but Collins found it more than Gray. He had the greater grace and the sweeter simplicity, and his “Ode to Simplicity” tells us the direction in which poetry was going. His best work, like “The Ode to Evening,” is near to Keats, and recalls that poet’s imaginative way. His inferior work is often rude and his style sometimes obscure, but when he is touched by joy in “ecstatic trial,” or when he sits with Melancholy in love of peace and gentle musing, he is indeed inspired by truth and loveliness.

  Johnson, a good and true friend of Collins, and though an untrustworthy critic of purely romantic poetry, likely to be conciliated rather than revolted by the classical form of the odes, broke the truth bluntly when he said that Collins’s inversion of phrase savoured of the mistake that “if you do not write prose you will write poetry.” In no true poet known to me, not in Rossetti, not in Donne, is the drawback of artificial poetic diction so obnoxious as in Collins. And the reason is clear. He was a true poet, a poet of the truest, who, unluckily for him, was singing in the spirit of one age with the tongue of another. He is trying to say Shibboleth, but he cannot; and though he says Sibboleth with exquisite grace, it is Sibboleth still.

  The landscape of Collins was apparently much influenced by Greek poetry. His work reminds us of the great, rugged, sublime, choral songs, of the audacious metaphors of Æschylus.

  Collins is among the choicest of English lyrical poets. There is a flute-like music in his best odes—such as the one “To Evening,” and the one written in 1746—“How sleep the brave,” which are sweeter, more natural, and more spontaneous than Gray’s.