While Spring shall pour his Show'rs, as oft he wont, While sallow Autumn fills thy Lap with Leaves, And rudely rends thy Robes. All these digressions, all this alternation of slow and fast rhythms, is as the waxing and waning of a fitful sunset, whose splendour leaves the beholder a dim, unsubstantial figure, gradually submerged by the oncoming tide of Night. Suddenly, with swift, silent footsteps Night marches down: So long, regardful of thy quiet Rule, Shall Fancy, Friendship, Science, smiling Peace, And love thy fav'rite Name! Thus the poem closes, with that air of finality which marks so much of Collins's work. This was the poet's supreme achievement. By this, more than by any other of his works, his name still lives. Collins did not receive his due meed of praise in his own day, nor has he been too generously treated by later critics. Gray, the only one of his contemporaries from whom he might reasonably have expected warm encouragement, failed to understand him. "Have you seen the works of two young Authors, a Mr. Warton and a Mr. Collins, both Writers of Odes?" Gray asks in a letter to his friend Wharton, written in December 1746,' and he continues thus: "It is odd enough, but each is the half of a considerable Man, and one the counterpart of the other. The first has but little Invention, very poetical choice of Expression, and a good Ear. The second, a fine fancy, model'd upon the Antique, a bad Ear, great Variety of Words, & Images with no choice at all. They both deserve to last some years, but will not." Chatterton, who did not scruple to make use of Collins in his own African • Letters, ed. Tovey, I, 153–4. 1 December 27. Eclogues and elsewhere, should have known better This refers to a different Let me like midnight cats, or Collins sing.1 With the lapse of time and the growth of romance Collins was a careful artist, constantly polishing and revising his work. "I have seen all his Odes already published in his own handwriting; they had all the marks of repeated correction; he was perpetually changing his epithets. I had lately his first manuscript of the Ode on the Death of Colonel Ross, with many interlineations and alterations." Such is the testimony of Thomas Warton." Collins's appeal can never be a wide one. He has gained a permanent, if obscured place in English poetry, but only an occasional enthusiast will come like Swinburne to demand for him more adequate recognition. Collins was a lover of earlier song, of poets neglected in his own day. He specially admired Ben Jonson and Spenser. As one writer says of Collins: "There were fires in him which were lighted by poets who lived before the time of the Stuarts." But Collins is linked to those who came after him, as well as to those who went before. In his world of abstractions he reminds us of Shelley, and in his treatment of them, in making them real and vivid, he is Shelley's equal if not his superior. In his pictorial style of writing he resembles Keats. His work lacks the colour of Keats's poetry. His 1 February: An Elegy. V. infra, p. 276, note 2. 8 Memoirs, 1851, II, 215. 5 Moy Thomas, Poetical Works of Collins, p. xix: "He was acquainted with the riches of the Elizabethan poets, at a time when few English students strayed beyond Cowley." v. Poetical Works of Gray, Parnell, Collins, ed. R.A., Willmott, pp. 23-4. • D. G. Mitchell, English Lands, Letters, and Kings, 1895, Vol. II, p. 162. figures are nearer to a statuesque plainness and severity than are the vividly painted pictures of Keats, but there is a bond of similarity between the two styles, and nowhere is this more closely seen than in a comparison of Collins's Ode to the Passions, and Keats's description of Bacchus in Endymion. That the same sources of inspiration are present in both is obvious at sight, though impossible to demonstrate with mathematical precision: When Chearfulness, a Nymph of healthiest Hue, Her Buskins gem'd with Morning Dew, Blew an inspiring Air, that Dale and Thicket rung, Peeping from forth their Alleys green; Brown Exercise rejoic'd to hear, And Sport leapt up, and seiz'd his Beechen Spear.1 And Keats, with the richer colouring of a later day, sings: And as I sat, over the light blue hills There came a noise of revellers: the rills The earnest trumpet spake, and silver thrills Within his car, aloft, young Bacchus stood, With sidelong laughing; And little rills of crimson wine imbru'd His plump white arms, and shoulders, enough white And near him rode Silenus on his ass, Tipsily quaffing." This and other passages give Collins a claim, apart from his nature poetry, to kinship with the later romantic period. But he lived before the sun of the new age was fully risen. Only in fitful gleams, dispelling for a moment the mists of disillusion, 1 Collins, To the Passions. 2 Endymion, Bk. IV, ll. 193-9, 209-17. the haunting melancholy of his time, did the light of Romance fall upon him, only then did he sing of Chearfulness and Joy. Two poems of Collins, an Ode to the Belle of Arragon, shown to Thomas Warton when the poet visited Oxford in 1754, and an Ode to the Music of the Grecian Theatre of which he speaks in a letter to Dr. Hayes of Oxford (who had written the music for his Ode on the Passions) are lost to us, if indeed the latter was ever written. The great Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland, sent to Home, the author of Douglas, was discovered only after Collins's death. Ragsdale, the Bond Street tradesman, says the poet burnt many of his poems as soon as they were written,' so that of much which might have thrown light upon the poet's genius, little remains. But they who love the yearning music of a minor key must ever appreciate this shadowy poet, singing his plaintive songs amid the "gradual dusky veil of a twilight that was soon to yield to the glory of a new poetic day. He lacked passion. He makes no popular appeal to the human heart. He wanders in the star-lit lands of poetry, in the Eventide of Song. It was in these dim poetic regions that Collins learned the secret of the still, passionless music that is all his own. Surely this pensive poet of a disillusioned age was at heart describing his own plaintive music when he told how: With Eyes up-rais'd, as one inspir'd, And from her wild sequester'd Seat, In Notes by Distance made more sweet, Pour'd thro' the mellow Horn her pensive Soul: Bubbling Runnels join'd the Sound; Thro' Glades and Glooms the mingled Measure stole, Love of Peace, and lonely Musing, In hollow Murmurs died away.' 1 To the Passions. Poetical Works of Collins, ed. Moy Thomas, p. xxxix. To The Passions. III THOMAS GRAY (1716-1771) Collins was not the only singer of a disillusioned age. He had in Gray at least one spiritual companion, though Gray failed fully to understand and appreciate his brother poet. There is no evidence to show that the two poets ever met. Personal companionship might possibly have brought understanding, but Gray maintained a scholarly seclusion which was rarely disturbed. In Gray's poetry "disillusion" is the key-note of the whole. The prevailing mood of a naturally brooding, introspective temperament, a mood which was developed by the spiritual and material isolation of the poet, finds full and frequent expression in his verse. Over the facts of Gray's life we must pass in haste. The son of middle-class parents comfortably situated, though unhappy in their married life, the poet was educated at Eton, and in 1734 entered Peterhouse, Cambridge. In 1738 he left Cambridge without taking his degree, intending to read for the Bar at the Inner Temple. The following year Gray accompanied his friend Horace Walpole on a Continental tour, leaving England on March 29, 1739. In 1741 a quarrel between the friends, at Reggio, led to Gray's return home. Walpole continued his journey alone, and Gray reached London in September 1741. The work of Gray as an English poet dates from the year after his return from the Grand Tour with Walpole; 1742 was indeed indeed Gray's annus mirabilis. In that year he wrote his Ode to Spring, the Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, a Sonnet on the Death of Richard West, the Hymn to Adversity, and possibly the Hymn to Ignorance, which appeared only after the poet's death. Gray's other poems, the Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat was enclosed in a letter to Walpole, Of |