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 respect worthy the imagination of COLLINS.

ODE TO FEAR.

R. C who had often determined

M 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 the 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 verfes,

when he feels the strong 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 nothing in the same species of poetry, either in his own, or in any other language, equal, in all respects, to the following defcription 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 fleep.

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

tions of terrour it was intended to excite. It has, moreover, the entire advantage of novelty to recommend it, for there is too much originality in all the circumftances to suppose that the author had in his eye that description of the penal fituation of Cataline in the ninth Æneid:

-Te, Catalina, minaci
Pendentem fcopulo-

The archetype of the English poet's idea was in nature, and probably, to her alone he was indebted for the thought. From her, likewife, he derived that magnificence of conception, that horrible grandeur of imagery difplayed in the following lines.

And thofe, the fiends, who near allied,
O'er Nature's wounds, and wrecks pre-

fide;

While

While Vengeance, in the lurid air,
Lifts her red arm, expos'd and bare:

On whom that ravening Brood of fate,
Who lap the blood of Sorrow, wait.

That nutritive enthusiasm, which cherishes the feeds of poetry, and which is, indeed, the only foil wherein they will grow to perfection, lays open the mind to all the influences of fiction. A paffion for whatever is greatly wild, or magnificent in the works of nature, feduces the imagination to attend to all that is extravagant, however unnatural. Milton was notoriously fond of high romance, and gothic diableries, and Collins, who in genius and enthusiasm bore no very diftant refemblance to Milton, was wholly carried away by the fame attachments.

Ba