And longer had she sung ;-but with a frown, Revenge impatient rose; He threw his blood-stain'd sword in thunder down; The war-denouncing trumpet took, And blew a blast so loud and dread, Were ne'er prophetic sounds so full of woe! And, ever and anon, he beat The doubling drum with furious heat; And though sometimes, each dreary pause between, Her soul-subduing voice applied, Yet still he kept his wild unalter'd mien, While each strain'd ball of sight seem'd bursting from his head. Sad proof of thy distressful state; Of differing themes the veering song was mix'd; And now it courted Love, now raving call'd on Hate. The publication of the Odes in 1747 is an epoch in English literature. The volume preceded by a year Gray's Ode on Eton. It was the first distinct break in the weary interregnum of dullness which assumed that the essential difference of poetry from moralizing is metre. Its music sounded in the deepest darkness just before the dawn. To have proclaimed that it is the poet's duty to sing would have entitled Collins to warm gratitude, had he no other title. Any one of a dozen lovely lyrics establishes an independent right. He has his defect; and he could not well have escaped it. Books, in conformity with his training, gave the impulse to his inspiration. When he desired to improve, or correct, still to books he went. A ripe scholar, he consulted primarily the Greek or Latin classics. In default of the Ancients he sat at the feet of illustrious Moderns. Unrivalled' Shakespeare, who 6 scorn'd the trifling rules of art, But knew to conquer and surprise the heart," gifted' Spenser, critic' Jonson, gentle' Fletcher, Roman' Corneille, and 'sweet' Racine, were his teachers. But his school was still a library. The result doubtless is a certain unreality. The characters move as on the Attic stage, with gestures too elaborately studied. Their life, actual life for the time being, is of the sort communicated to Pygmalion's statue. The action in general is that of the theatre. We may be sure from the incidents of his life, with its hardships and disappointments, that he had opened many pages of the book of Man. The sad close of his career indicates even an excess of introspection. But we are as conscious in him, as in Gray, that his habit was to view humanity through dead eyes, and much less conscious than in Gray, that observation at first hand had preceded. Yet, without using experience or social intercourse to stir or feed inspiration, Collins was inspired. I have heard a nightingale in January sing in the dining-room of a Turin hotel. It mistook the lights and warmth for the chequered shades of a sunset in May. Collins was such a nightingale. He was set singing mainly by borrowed light from Sophocles, Pindar, Virgil, Horace. From dead tongues, however, the inspiration for him was vital and vitalizing. The answering flame it kindled in his breast was quick and pure. No sordid calculations of patronage fanned it; and in dismal truth it brought him no reward in money, or even praise. With a public requiring of poetry that, to be popular, it should retail the gossip of a tavern or drawing-room, versify a sermon, or flatter, if it did not libel, a Minister, I do not suppose he could have done better than imagine himself back into a living Greece. His Muse was more worthily employed in dreaming of Harmodius and Aristogeiton than, as once in a fit of angry Whig panic, in travestying the Butcher of Culloden as a hero. If the music has always a far-off, and sometimes a thin and reedy,. cadence, the fault is in the period, not in the singer. He could not freely breathe the air about him. The soil he trod could not nourish his genius. It would have been different half a century later, when the sluggish vapours of a self-satisfied age were rolling away. I account it a strange and happy accident, that for one song, as it was, they lifted enough for him to catch no mere refraction from his books of green fields and blue sky, but to breathe real air, and to see the actual heavens above him. The volume of 1747 contained, together with the several Odes to the Passions, that To Evening; and, all but perfect though it is, it shared in the general neglect. Never was there in a single body of verse a more entire contrast to the mass. It is pervaded by a quality-selfrestraint-rare in all poets, rarest in the young: perhaps least to be expected of one like its writer. It has so much more to say than it says. With a soft hand it seems to cool life's fever, to still the stir of wakeful Nature herself; to hush the throbs also of the restless fancy, from which more brilliant, but not more beautiful, creatures of song had emerged into being : If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song, May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear, Thy springs, and dying gales; O nymph reserved, while now the bright-hair'd sun With brede ethereal wove, O'erhang his wavy bed; Now air is hush'd, save where the weak-eyed bat As oft he rises 'midst the twilight path, Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum; Now teach me, maid composed, To breathe some soften'd strain, Whose numbers, stealing through thy darkening vale, May not unseemly with its stillness suit;. As, musing slow, I hail Thy genial lov'd return! For when thy folding star arising shows And many a Nymph who wreathes her brows with sedge, The pensive Pleasures sweet, Then let me rove some wild and heathy scene; Whose walls more awful nod By thy religious gleams. Or, if chill blustering winds, or driving rain, And hamlets brown, and dim-discover'd spires; The gradual dusky veil. While Spring shall pour his showers, as oft he wont, Beneath thy lingering light; While sallow Autumn fills thy lap with leaves; And rudely rends thy robes; So long, regardful of thy quiet rule, Shall Fancy, Friendship, Science, smiling Peace, And love thy favourite name! 8 No comet this, flaming from a youthful, teeming brain, but a luminous shadow from a large soul. It is impossible to assign limits to poetic capabilities such as it indicates. On students of literature coming suddenly, in the mideighteenth-century wilderness, upon the poetry of Collins, of whichever class, the effect is startling. The light of a star suddenly flashes upon them, and as suddenly goes out. His contemporaries, unless a few acquaintances like Samuel Johnson, and he but partially, could not see Heaven as it opened to him. They were as careless of one offer by him to labour for them as of another, of a History of the Revival of Learning, as of an Ode to the Passions. They let him, with the great songs he had sung, with the as great, if not greater, he might have sung, beat his starved wings. against the cage bars of crass indifference-until the tragic end—a monomaniac moaning year after year up and down the cathedral cloisters of his birthplace. The Poetical Works of William Collins (Aldine Edition of the British Poets). William Pickering, 1853. 1 Ode on the Death of Thomson, vv. 13–16. 2 Dirge in Cymbeline; Sung by Guiderus and Arviragus over Fidele, supposed to be dead, vv. 13-24. 3 Ode to Fear, vv. 12-15. 5 Ode to Mercy, vv. 17-19. "On our last Taste in Music, vv. 65-6. 4 Ode to Pity, vv. 1-2. 6 The Passions, vv. 17-56. 8 Ode to Evening. |