literary criticism is conventional, and in one instance glaringly false. Collins had attempted the battle of Pope without Pope's weapons.

The odes are unequal in merit and interest; but they have certain elements in common, which may be spoken of first.

There is a tendency nowadays, especially in comparisons of Collins with Gray, to overrate the purely lyric quality in the poetry of the former. Compared with contemporary poets, he had a conspicuous lyrical gift. But to ears accustomed to the wizard strains of Coleridge, the Ariel-like harpings and skylark flights of Shelley, and the passionate harmonies of Swinburne the music of Collins's lines seems

comparatively commonplace and cold. His verse never soars, and it does sometimes stumble or creep. Its best qualities are finish, ease, and a certain quiet purity and richness. Collins plays a flute of clear and mellow tone.

Collins's style excels in picturesque and sculpturesque effects. In the mind's eye he saw ideal scenes and forms with wonderful clearness, and with few strokes he could

describe what he saw. One may or may not be interested in the picture or bas-relief, but one cannot fail to see it. The classic purity, conciseness, and repose of the style of the odes are doubly grateful nowadays, in contrast with the carelessness of the century's early romanticists and the painful "preciousness" of fin-de-siècle æsthetes. Collins's style is at once natural and artful; and occasionally it combines ease with compact richness in passages that remind one of the early style of Milton. In other places, especially in the Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands, his growing Romanticism shows itself in a restrained warmth of color somewhat after Spenser's best manner. But it must be confessed that not infrequently the style of the odes is commonplace and flat.

The imagination of Collins was limited in range. His

vision was confined almost wholly to ideal abstractions, to the supernatural, to a few phases of nature allied to the ideal or the supernatural, and to periods in the world's history and literature embodying his ideals of art and freedom. And in effect his range was even narrower than would appear from this enumeration; for the most prominent objects before his mind's eye were the ideal abstractions, round which gathered his thoughts upon art, freedom, nature, and the supernatural. This lack of grasp upon concrete reality, upon human and dramatic interest, is the chief reason why the poetry of Collins never has been popular and never can be. "The defect of his poetry in general," says Craik, "is that there is too little of earth in it: in the purity and depth of its beauty it resembles the bright blue sky." But his personified abstractions are usually saved from emptiness and frigidity by his habit of associating with them concrete facts illustrative of the quality in hand. Thus we know Liberty by Greece, Switzerland, and Britain; Fear, by storms, tragedy, and ghosts.

Collins's thought had about the same limitations as his imagination, for he seems to have thought chiefly in images. His purely intellectual power was not remarkable. He had apparently meditated more upon questions of literary theory than upon any other topic; and even here he shows, in general, fine feeling rather than originality or depth of thought. It should, however, be remembered that at the time when he wrote most of his odes Collins was still a very young man. His enthusiasm for liberty seems to have proceeded rather from instinct than from reflection; it was a part of his freedom-loving temperament, which showed itself also in his life and in his departure from literary conventions. In brief, one sees many pictures in the pages of Collins, but does not receive much truth.

1 History of English Literature, London, 1864, vol. II, p. 284.

ee

The passion in the odes is neither powerful nor of wide. range, but it is always fine and sometimes exquisite. Collins was not a robust nature. He was mistaken if he really supposed himself capable of writing tragedy; that calls for sterner stuff than the delicate, sensitive horror of the terrible which palpitates through the Ode to Fear. But in pathos, and the tender emotions generally, the odes are rich. Collins had skill to complain," wrote his first editor, who should be thankful to have said one good thing amid many foolish. This note of tenderness, of delicate pity blended with fancy, which vibrates again and again in Collins's verse and reveals a nature of remarkable purity and sensitiveness, is what chiefly endears him to the reader. Here at least he is human, although his tenderness is usually too ideal in form, too aloof from the beaten paths of life, to reach the popular heart like the tenderness of Burns or Longfellow.

The gentleness and repose of the poet's nature appear conspicuously in his steady love for the country life. Beginning with the Eclogues, the song about Damon, and the dirge for Fidele, he ended with the quiet woodland and river scenery of the stanzas on Thomson and with the sketch of Kilda's simple folk in the Highlands ode; while in the intermediate Odes of 1747, as M. Montégut has happily remarked, we see "une miniature d'Arcadie, d'où surgissent en abondance des images de paix, de repos, et de silence.”1 Collins's dislike of war and his love of peace breathe the same spirit. He even associates his beloved pastoral atmosphere with martial subjects, and, to quote again from the critic just named, is probably "le seul poète qui ait chantè l'héroisme et la vertu militaire sur le chalumeau, la tenuis avena de Tityre."

1 Heures de Lecture d'un Critique, Paris, 1891, p. 208.

2 Ibid.

Three of the odes, The Passions, the Ode to Evening, and How Sleep the Brave, have attained to something of popularity and call for brief special comment.

The Passions, the most popular, is the least poetical of the three. In addition to the didacticism and the lack of unity commented upon elsewhere,1 the poem is injured by a certain hollowness and declamatory tone. The imagination merely glances over the surface of the subject. In places it is difficult to escape the impression that we are witnessing a "performance," in which the Passions go through their appointed parts. Hope smiles and waves her golden hair, Melancholy plays upon the horn with pensive prettiness, Revenge beats the drum and strains his eyeballs. We look on unmoved. There is more of imaginative abandon in the lively lines about Cheerfulness and Joy. But in the tone of the poem as a whole may be found an explanation of the melancholy fact that as early as 1782 the ode had already become the victim of "frequent public recitals."2 The merits of The Passions are considerable. The perfect clearness of the style, the easy if rather metallic and too obvious music of the verse, the purity and finish of the pictures, have doubtless combined with the declamatory manner to render the ode popular. Yet the fact remains that in delicacy of feeling and penetrative imagination it is inferior to several of the less popular poems.

The Ode to Evening is the most modern of Collins's poems, resembling, as has already been pointed out, the work of the impressionist school. But it was a favorite with lovers of poetry long before that school arose, and it will continue to be a favorite long after modern literary fashions shall have passed away. Although less popular than The Deserted Village and Gray's Elegy, the Ode to Evening is yet like them in embodying in exquisite form sights, sounds, and feelings

of such permanent beauty that age cannot wither them nor custom stale. In all the finer qualities of poetry, in unobtrusive melody, in nameless felicity of phrase, in fancy and imagination, in suggestive description, in feeling for the delicately beautiful in nature, it is far superior, not only to the more strepitant ode on the Passions, but to nearly all of Collins's verse. Its sustained poetic tone is the more remarkable because of the introduction of homely details about the bat and beetle, which are taken up into the imaginative atmosphere of the poem and help to give it realism and distinction without loss of beauty or dignity. The ode will be read and loved so long as the sights and sounds of evening itself are loved by readers of English poetry.

In one respect, however, the Ode to Evening is sadly imperfect. The last three stanzas fall so far below the rest that the reader must either make for himself an ending, which is not a conclusion, at the fortieth line, or rise from the poem with. an unpleasant sense of beauty marred by wooden conventionalism. There remains for mention, however, one poem not only exquisite in parts but perfect as a whole, a diamond of small size but of the finest quality and cutting. Pathos and fancy were perhaps never so successfully blended as in the lines How Sleep the Brave, which are themselves like a knell rung by "fairy hands." The mingled delicacy and majesty of the mourning figures, the ideality and truth in the three-word characterization of Spring, the sustained tone of repose, the combination of grace with economy and richness of expression, all these unite to form a whole of gentle but enduring charm. The little poem is perfect of its kind, and the kind is exquisite. A violet is not superior in daintiness, delicate precision of outline, and cool fragrance.

ee

The poetry of Collins does not strive nor lift up its voice