ODE TO PITY.
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“By Pella’s bard, a magic name,
By all the griefs his thoughts could frame,
Receive my humble rite:
Long, Pity, let the nations view
Thy sky-worn robes of tenderest blue,
And eyes of dewy light!”
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The propriety of invoking Pity, through the mediation of Euripides, is obvious.––That admirable poet had the keys of all the tender passions, and therefore could not but stand in the highest esteem with a writer of Mr. Collins’s sensibility.––He did, indeed, admire him as much as Milton professedly did, and probably for the same reasons; but we do not find that he has copied him so closely as the last mentioned poet has sometimes done, and particularly in the opening of Samson Agonistes, which is an evident imitation of the following passage in the Phœnissæ:
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Hηγου παροιθε, θυγατερ, ὡς τυφλω ποδι
Οφθαλμος ει συ, ναυτιλοισιν αστρον ὡς;
Δευρ’ εις το λευρον πεδον ιχνος τιθεις’ εμον,
Προβαινε––––
Act. III. Sc. I.
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The “eyes of dewy light” is one of the happiest 125 strokes of imagination, and may be ranked among those expressions which
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“––give us back the image of the mind.”
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“Wild Arun too has heard thy strains,
And Echo, ’midst my native plains,
Been soothed by Pity’s lute.”
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“There first the wren thy myrtles shed
On gentlest Otway’s infant head.”
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Sussex, in which county the Arun is a small river, had the honour of giving birth to Otway as well as to Collins: both these poets, unhappily, became the objects of that pity by which their writings are distinguished. There was a similitude in their genius and in their sufferings. There was a resemblance in the misfortunes and in the dissipation of their lives; and the circumstances of their death cannot be remembered without pain.
The thought of painting in the temple of Pity the history of human misfortunes, and of drawing the scenes from the tragic muse, is very happy, and in every respect worthy the imagination of Collins.
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