B

ODE TO PITY.

Y Pella's Bard, a magic name,

By all the griefs his thought could frame,

Receive my humble rite:

Long, Pity, let the nations view

Thy fky-worn robes of tendereft blue
And eyes of dewy light!

The propriety of invoking Pity through the mediation of Euripides is obvious.-That admirable poet had the keys of all the tender paffions, and, therefore, could not but stand in the highest efteem with a writer of Mr. COLLINS'S fenfibility. He did, indeed, admire him as much as MILTON profeffedly did, and probably for the fame reafons; but we do not find that he has copied him so closely as the laft mentioned poet has fometimes done,

and particularly in the opening of SamfonAgonistes, which is an evident imitation of the following paflage in the ΦΟΙΝΙΣΣΑΙ.

Η[ε παροιθε, θυγατες, ὡς τυφλῷ ποδί
Οφθαλμος ει συ, ναυβαταισιν αερον ώς,
Δευρ' εις το λευρον πεδον · τίθεισ' εμον,

Пробите.

Ίχνος

A& III. Sc. I.

The "eyes of dewy light" is one of the happieft ftrokes of imagination, and may be rank

ed among thofe expreffions which

-give us back the image of the mind.

Wild ARUN too has heard thy ftrains,

And Echo, 'midft my native plains,

Been footh'd with Pity's lute.

There firfl the wren thy myrtles fhed
On gentleft OTWAY's infant head,

Suffex, in which county the Arun is a small river, had the honour of giving birth to OTWAY

OTWAY as well as to COLLINS: both these poets, unhappily, became the objects of that pity by which their writings are diftinguished. There was a fimilitude in their genius and in their fufferings. There was a resemblance in the misfortunes and in the diffipation of their lives; and the circumftances of their death cannot be remembered without pain.

THE thought of painting in the temple of Pity the hiftory of human misfortunes, and of drawing the scenes from the tragic muse, is very happy, and in every refpect worthy the imagination of COLLINS.

ODE TO FEAR.

R. C who had often determined

MR.C

to apply himself to dramatic poetry,

feems here, with the fame view, to have addreffed one of the principal powers of the drama, and to implore that mighty influence she had given to the genius of Shakespear:

Hither again thy fury deal,

Teach me but once like him to feel ;
His cyprefs-wreath my meed decree,
And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee!"

In the conftruction of this nervous ode the author has fhewn equal power of judgment and imagination. Nothing can be more ftriking than the violent and abrupt abbreviation of the measure in the fifth and fixth verses,

when

when he feels the ftrong influences of the power he invokes :

Ah Fear! ah frantic Fear!

I fee, I fee thee near.

The editor of thefe poems has met with no thing in the fame fpecies of poetry, either in his own, or in any other language, equal, in all refpects, to the following description of Danger.

Danger, whofe limbs of giant-mold,
What mortal eye can fix'd behold?
Who ftalks his round, an hideous form,
Howling amidst the midnight ftorm,
Or throws him on the ridgy steep

Of fome loose, hanging rock to sleep.

It is impoffible to contemplate the image conveyed in the two laft verfes without those emo