COLLINS.
When Thomson was laid in Richmond Church, another poet chanted over him a dirge breathing the very pathos of Nature herself:—
“In yonder grave a Druid lies,
Where slowly winds the stealing wave,
The year’s best sweets shall duteous rise
To deck its poet’s sylvan grave.
“Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore,
When Thames in summer wreaths is drest,
And oft suspend the dashing oar
To bid his gentle spirit rest.”
About that ode of the gentle and pensive Collins (born 1721, died 1759) there is a sweet pathetic tone which the grander strains of later English poetry have never surpassed. In the “Dirge over Fidele” the same strain of pensive beauty is renewed. Collins was the first poet since Milton wrote his early lyrics who brought to the description of rural things that perfection of style, that combined simplicity and beauty, which Milton had learned from the classic poets There is another poem of Collins’s which, if not so perfect in expression as the two just named, is interesting as almost the earliest inroad by an English poet into the wild and romantic world which the Highlands of Scotland contain, unless we except Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” This is Collins’s ode on the “Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland.” It seems that in the autumn of 1749, Home, the author of the tragedy of “Douglas,” had, when on a visit to London, during his brief stay made the acquaintance of Collins, and kindled his imagination with tales of the Highlands and the Hebrides. Collins seems to have deepened this interest by the perusal of Martin’s curious book on the Western Isles, and on Home’s return to Scotland Collins addressed to him the ode, in which the English poet entered with a deeper, more imaginative insight into the weird and wild superstitions of the Gael than any Scottish poet had as yet shown. After describing with great force and truthfulness the second sight, the wraith, the water-kelpie, and many such-like things, he closes with this apostrophe:—
“All hail! ye scenes that o’er my soul prevail!
Ye splendid friths and lakes, which, far away,
Are by smooth Annan filled, or pastoral Tay,
Or Don’s romantic springs, at distance hail!
The time shall come, when I, perhaps, may tread
Your lowly glens, o’erhung with spreading broom;
Or, o’er your stretching heaths, by fancy led;
Or, o’er your mountains creep, in awful gloom.”
Poor Collins: this hope was never fulfilled. A deeper gloom than any that rests on the Highland mountains too soon gathered over him. The ode itself does not seem to have received the notice it deserves, both for its own excellence and as the first symptom of a new and enlarged feeling about Nature entering into English poetry. In the above extract the word “glen” occurs. Is there any earlier instance of its use in English poetry or prose? The Scottish poets, except the ballad-writers, were afraid to use it till the time of Scott. Macpherson in his translations of Ossian, twelve years later than this ode, uniformly renders the Gaelic “gleann” by the insipid “vale.”
But the most perfect and original poem of Collins, as well as the most finely appreciative of Nature, is his Ode to Evening. No doubt evening is personified in his address as “maid composed,” and “calm votaress,” but the personification is so delicately handled, and in so subdued a tone, that it does not jar on the feelings, as such personifications too often do:—
“If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song,
May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,
Like thy own solemn springs,
Thy springs and dying gales,
“O nymph reserved, while now the bright-haired sun
Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts,
With brede ethereal wove,
O’erhang his wavy bed:
“Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat
With short, shrill shriek, flits by on leathern wing;
Or where the beetle winds
His small but sullen horn,
“As oft he rises ’midst the twilight path,
Against the pilgrim borne in needless hum
Now teach me, maid composed,
To breathe some softened strain.
...
“Then lead, calm votaress, where some sheety lake
Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallowed pile,
Or upland fallows gray
Reflect its last cool gleam.
“But when chill, blustering winds, or driving rain,
Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut,
That from the mountain’s side,
Views wilds, and swelling floods,
“And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires,
And hears the simple bell, and marks o’er all,
Thy dewy finger draw
The gradual dusky veil.”
There is about the whole ode a subdued twilight tone, a remoteness from men and human things, and a pensive evening musing, all the more expressive, because it does not shape itself into definite thoughts, but reposes in appropriate images. And, as the Aldine biographer observes,—“The absence of rhyme leaves the even flow of the verse unbroken, and the change at the end of each stanza into shorter lines, as if the voice of the reader dropped into a lower key, contributes to the effect.”
In Thomson there was probably an observation of the facts of Nature wider and more varied, but in Collins there is an intermingling of human feeling with Nature’s aspects which is at once more delicate and deep.
The increased sensibility to Nature which in English poetry appeared in Thomson, was carried on through the eighteenth century to its close by Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper, and manifested itself in each of these poets in a way characteristic of himself.