THE DYING KID. A tear bedews my Delia's eye, To think yon playful kid must die; Erewhile in sportive circles round She saw him wheel, and frisk, and bound; Pleased on his various freaks to dwell She tells with what delight he stood She tells me how with eager speed His every frolic light as air But knows my Delia, timely wise, Soon would the vine his wounds deplore, No more those bowers might Strephon see, Each wayward passion soon would tear Then mourn not the decrees of Fate MUCH TASTE AND SMALL ESTATE. See yonder hill, so green, so round, That crown a poet's vast desire. Then, near it, scoop the vaulted cell (For Wisdom flies from vulgar eyes :) But did the Muses haunt his cell? WILLIAM COLLINS. [WILLIAM COLLINS was born at Chichester on Christmas Day, 1721. It is believed that he went for a time to the Prebendal School of that city; and in 1733 he entered Winchester College, then under Dr. Burton. Before he left school he had written the Persian Eclogues (which in their later editions are called Oriental Eclogues); and he had printed a so-called sonnet in the Gentleman's Magazine. In 1740 he entered as commoner of Queen's College, Oxford, there being no vacancy at New College; and next year he obtained a demyship at Magdalen. The Persian Eclogues were published in 1742; next year came the Epistle to Sir T. Hanmer; and in 174+ he seems to have left Oxford for London, where he found a true friend in Johnson. His Odes, which he once meant to have published jointly with those of his old schoolfellow Joseph Warton, appeared alone in 1747. After this he went to live at Richmond, where he saw much of Thomson, Armstrong, and others of that company. In 1749 he wrote the Ode on the death of Thomson, and the Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands. Soon afterwards he was attacked by the brain-disease from which, with certain intervals of partial recovery, he suffered for the rest of his life. His last years were spent at Chichester under the care of his sister Mrs. Sempill. He died in 1759. It should be mentioned that the textual variations in the different editions of Collins' poems are very numerous.] In the reaction against that sweeping violence of indiscriminative depreciation with which the school of poets and critics usually registered as Wordsworthian, but actually founded at midnight by William Blake and fortified at sunrise by William Wordsworth, was wont for some half a century to overwhelm the poetry and criticism of the century preceding, the name which of all properly belonging to that period has incomparably the most valid and solid claim to the especial and essential praise that denotes a poet from among other men of genius has hardly yet taken by general consent the place which is unquestionably its due. Even in his own age it was the fatally foolish and uncritical fashion to couple the name of Collins with that of Gray, as though they were poets of the same order or kind. As an elegiac poet, Gray holds for all. ages to come his unassailable and sovereign station; as a lyric poet, he is simply unworthy to sit at the feet of Collins. Whether it may not be a greater thing than ever was done by the greater lyrist, to have written a poem of such high perfection and such universal appeal to the tenderest and the noblest depths of human feeling as Gray's Elegy, is of course another and a wholly irrelevant question. But it is not a question which admits of debate at all, among men qualified to speak on such matters, that as a lyric poet Gray was not worthy to unloose the latchets of his shoes. The fanfaronade and falsetto which impair the always rhetorically elaborate and sometimes genuinely sonorous notes of Gray were all but impossible to the finer touch of his precursor. In the little book of odes which dropped, a still-born immortal, from the press, and was finally burnt up even to the last procurable copy by the hands of its author in a fever-fit of angry despair, there was hardly a single false note; and there were not many less than sweet or strong. There was, above all things, a purity of music, a clarity of style, to which I know of no parallel in English verse from the death of Andrew Marvell to the birth of William Blake. Here, in the twilight which followed on the splendid sunset of Pope, was at last a poet who was content to sing out what he had in him—to sing and not to say, without a glimpse of wit or a flash of eloquence. These two valuable and admirable superfluities had for generations been regarded, not as fortuitous accessories, but as indispensable requisites, to poetic genius. Nothing so clearly shows how much finer a sense of poetry than is usually attributed to him lay radi. cally latent, when unobscured by theories or prepossessions, in the deliberate judgment of Dr. Johnson, as his recognition in Collins of the eminent and exquisite faculty which he rightly efused to recognise in Gray. The strong-lunged and heavy-handed preacher of The Vanity of Human Wishes had an ear fine enough at least to distinguish the born lyric poet from him who had been made one, though self-made. His recognition of Collins had been ready and generous in his youth; it was faithful and consistent in his old age. And in both seasons he stood then, almost as he stands now, alone in the insight of his perception and the courage of his loyalty. For it needed some courage as well as some openness of mind and sureness of instinct to acknowledge as well as to appreciate a quality of merit far more alien than was the quality of Gray's best work from the merit of Pope and his scholars; among |