on Collins in this matter. "By labour," Wesley writes, " a man may become a tolerable imitator of Spenser, Shakespeare or Milton; and may heap together many pretty compound epithets, as paleeyed, meek-eyed, and the like; but unless he be born a poet, he will never attain the genuine spirit of poetry." Pale-eyed and meek-eyed, it will be remembered, both occur in Milton's Nativity Ode, and they no doubt suggested, or helped to suggest, Collins' similar formations, though, of course, youngeyed was taken by him straight from Shakespeare. Only, Collins happened to be born a poet. Even in his inferior odes, Collins often reaches, by instinct and seemingly without effort, to his incomparable translucency. Thus for instance, in the Ode on the Poetical Character: "When He, who called with thought to birth And dressed with springs and forests tall, Thus in the Ode to Liberty: "Beyond yon braided clouds that lie Paving the light-embroidered sky.” The "return to Nature," of which he was one of the prime initiators, expresses itself in phrases to which Arnold, a century later, offers the nearest parallel. "Teach me but once like him to feel," Collins writes of Shakespeare; the cry is that of Arnold's Memorial Verses on the Death of Wordsworth, "But who, ah! who will make us feel?" In the noble Ode to Simplicity, the eighth stanza sums up what may be called Collins' poetical doctrine or his poetical message, though both these terms are open to exception: Though taste, though genius bless To some divine excess, Faints the cold work till thou inspire the whole; May court, may charm our eye, Thou, only thou, canst raise the meeting soul!" Of Collins, as of some other poets, notably of Coleridge-to whom Collins presents some curious and fertile analogies-it is to be observed that their finest and most characteristic work is wholly unique. Where it can be brought into comparison with that of other poets of the first rank it is apt to be inferior to theirs. It would be tempting to pursue this point somewhat into detail, but would lead us too far from the main subject at present. One pair of instances may suffice to indicate what I mean. When Collins writes in the Ode on Popular Superstitions, "For him in vain his anxious wife shall wait Or wander forth to meet him on his way; For him in vain at to-fall of the day His babes shall linger at the unclosing gate "* one is inevitably reminded of the stanza in Gray's Elegy, written at almost exactly the same time: "For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn No children run to lisp their sire's return, Collins' lines have, even here, his wonderful * He had written "at the cottage gate" first. limpid quality, and his felicity in the avoidance of merely ornamental or otiose epithet, the great snare, as Goldsmith pointed out, of the poets of that period. Note, too, the particularity (a note of the lyric) in contrast with Gray's superb generalisation. But Gray's touch is stronger, his music richer and ampler. The contrast of the two quatrains gives the key to the distinction between Gray and Collins as lyrists. Similarly, when reading in Coleridge's Ode to Sara, "The tears that tremble down your cheek In pity's dew divine; And from your heart the sighs that steal one's mind passes at once to Wordsworth's— "And vital feelings of delight Shall rear her form to stately height, Her virgin bosom swell; Here in this happy dell: " and beside it, Coleridge's lines, with all their melodious ease, lose their lustre and faint like a dazzled morning moon. The poetical affinity between Collins and Coleridge at which I have hinted has, I think, largely escaped notice. It would repay study. Even the circumstances of their life, as well as their peculiarities of mental temperament, present curious analogies. Both had, and doubtless had to pay for, a remark able precocity of genius. Both suffered from languor of mood and infirmity of will. Both wrote with seemingly effortless ease, and with fluctuating inspiration. The poetical production of both, or what matters of it, is confined within a space of five or six years, followed in the one by mental collapse and early death, in the other, by that joyless atrophy of which Coleridge himself in his swan-song, the Dejection Ode, has given the perfect and immortal account. In one of Coleridge's early pieces, written in 1793-or so he says, and in this instance there seems no reason to believe that he is not telling the truth-there is a passage which, if it were now to be published for the first time as a recovered fragment by Collins, would probably be accepted as his without question; for the style, rhythm and diction are in all respects indistinguishable from his : "For lo! attendant on thy steps are seen And white-robed Purity of soul, Mirth of the loosely flowing hair, And meek-eyed Pity eloquently fair, Whose tearful cheeks are lovely to the view, Had Collins, at the critical period described with such just insight and sympathetic understanding by Johnson, when he was adrift as a young man in London, come into contact with a complementary genius like that of 'Wordsworth, it is difficult to set limits to the poetical splendours which might have resulted. But that is a vain speculation. As it was, he had no one but the two Wartons, whose outlook was in effect the same as his own, and who in any case were not made out of the material that strikes fire by contact. Had he known Gray, perhaps? Yet even there the essential difference-one of pitch as well as of key-might only have produced an incurable discord. As it is, the tiny volume of his poems places him imperishably in England's Helicon. It gives for perpetuity that image of which Wordsworth speaks in the lines headed "Remembrance of Collins," composed, like the exquisite Ode to which they refer, on the Thames near Richmond: "The image of a poet's heart, How bright, how solemn, how serene!" Fame did not come to him in his life; but it did not fail to overtake him later, and it will not leave him now. |