fresh from his pet paradise of that corner of Shropshire-and certainly carrying a honeyed rhythmic flow: "My banks they are furnished with bees, Whose murmur invites one to sleep; My grottoes are shaded with trees, And my hills are white over with sheep. I seldom have met with a loss, Such health do my fountains bestow; My fountains all bordered with moss Where the hare-bells and violets grow." William Collins1 was a man of a totally different stamp-better worth your knowingyet maybe with the general public not so well known. 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. He was only a hatter's boy from Chichester, in the South of England; was at Oxford for a while, and left there in a huffthough securing a degree, 1743; afterward went to London; wrote and printed some odes, which he knew were better than most current poetry, but which nobody bought or read. sulked under that neglect, and his rage ran 1 He 1 William Collins, b. 1721; d. 1759. Interesting memoir by Moy Thomas, published in 1858. sometimes to verse-sometimes to drink; he had known Thomson and Johnson, and both befriended him; but the world did not; indeed he never met the world half way; the poetic phrenzy in him so fined his sensibilities that he could not and would not put out a feeling hand for promiscuous greetings. Poverty, too, came in the wake of his poetic cultures, to aggravate his mental inaptitudes and his moral distractions-all ending at last in a mad-house. He was not, to be sure, continuously under restraint-such terrific restraints as belonged to treatment of the insane in that day; but for a half dozen or more years of the latter part of his life-wandering all awry-saying weak and pointless things, in place of the odes which had coruscated under his fine fancy; lingering about his childhood's home; stealing under the cathedral vaults of Chichester (in which city his body rests now), and lifting up a vacant and wild treble of sound in dreary sing-song to mingle with the music from the choir. There are accomplished critics who insist that the odes of Collins carry in them the finest and the loftiest strains which go to marry the music of the nineteenth century poets to the music of the days of Elizabeth. Certain it is, that he loomed far above the ding-dong of such as Shenstone-that he scorned the classic trammels of the empire of Pope-certain that there were fires in him which were lighted by poets who lived before the time of the Stuarts, and which gave foretaste and promise of the freedom and the graces that shine to-day.1 I cannot quote better to show his quality than from that "Ode to Evening" which is so often cited: "For when thy folding star arising, shows His pale circlet at his warning lamp, The fragrant hours and elves Who slept in flowers the day, "And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with sedge, And sheds the freshening dew, and, lovelier still, The pensive pleasures sweet, Prepare thy shadowy car. "Then lead, calm votress, where some sheety lake Cheers the lone heath, or some time hallowed pile, Or upland fallows gray Reflect its last cool gleam. 1 Swinburne says, with something more than his usual exaggeration-"the only man of his time who had in him a note of pure lyric song";—excluding Gray, and both the Wesleys! "But when chill, blustering winds or driving rain "And hamlets brown and dim discovered spires And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all Thy dewy fingers draw The gradual dusky veil." This is poetry that goes without help of rhyme; even its halts are big with invitations to the "upland fallows gray," and to the "pensive pleasures sweet." Swinburne says, with piquancy and truth, "Corot, on canvas, might have signed the 'Ode to Evening.'" Dr. Johnson, who was a strong friend of Collins, tells us, in his Lives of the Poets, that he died in 1756; and that story is repeated by most early biographies; the truth is, however, that after that date he was living-only a sort of death in life, under the care of his sister at Chichester; and it was not until 1759, whenhis moral and physical wreck complete-the end came. MISS BURNEY We have next to bring to your notice, a clever, somewhat frisky, débonnaire young person of the other sex, whom you should know-whom perhaps you do know; I mean Miss Frances Burney.1 You will remember that we have encountered her once before pushing her kindly way into old Dr. Johnson's ante-room when he was near to death. The old gentleman had known intimately her father, Dr. Burney, and had always shown for her a strong attachment; so did a great many of Dr. Burney's acquaintances, Garrick among them and Burke; and it was probably from such men and their talk that she caught the literary bee in her bonnet and wrote her famous story of Evelina. You should read that story-whatever you may do with Cecilia and other later ones-if only to see how good and cleanly a piece of work in the way of a society novel can come out of those broiling times, when Humphrey Clinker and Tom Jones and the prurient and sentimental languors of Richardson were on the toilette tables of the clever and the honest. The book of Evelina is, all over, Miss Burney; that gives it the rarest and best sort of realism. Through all her work indeed, we have this over-jubilant and gushing, yet timid 1Frances Burney, b. 1752; d. 1840. She is perhaps better known as Mme. D'Arblay; though she married somewhat late in life, and after her reputation had been won. |