like the land of the Lotus-eaters in Tennyson. The stanza beginning
And when a shepherd of the Hebrid isles,
Set far amid the melancholy main
is the voice of reviving poetry, and is immortal. Nobody has the slightest sympathy with
The Knight of arts and industry,
And his achievements fair;
That by his castle's overthrow
Secur'd and crowned were.
The castle is a very good castle, it is good to be there, where no cocks disturb the dawn, no dogs murder sleep, "no babes, no wives, no hammers" make a din,
But soft-embodied Fays through airy portals stream.
William Collins.
"The grandeur of wildness and the novelty of extravagance, were always desired by Collins, but not always attained," says Dr. Johnson. After half a century of tame poets, we are happy to meet with one who did not cultivate the trim parterre, and who sometimes did attain to being "exquisitely wild".
Collins was born at Chichester on Christmas Day, 1721, was educated at Winchester, and at Oxford was a "demy," or scholar of Magdalen, like Addison. About 1744 he came to London with many literary projects in his mind, and very little money in his pockets. Johnson met him, while "immured by a bailiff". Collins cleared his debt with money advanced by a confiding bookseller on the credit of a contemplated translation of Aristotle's "Poetics," with a commentary. A legacy of £2000 from an uncle, Colonel Martin, was "a sum which Collins could scarcely think exhaustible, and which he did not live to exhaust". His mind weakened: he died in 1759: sane, but incapable of composition. His Odes (1746-1747) are the firm base of his renown: the little volume is extremely scarce; Collins is said to have burned, in disappointment, the greater part of the edition.
Of his "Persian Eclogues" (1742) Collins said that they were his "Irish Eclogues," being inadequately Oriental in local colour. The brief "Ode" (1746) "How Sleep the Brave" (of Fontenoy and Culloden) in ten lines has the magic of an elder day, and of all time. The "Ode to Evening," where the poet sees