"Then lead, calm votress, 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 their simple bell, and marks o'er all
Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil."
This is poetry that goes without help of rhyme; even its halts are big with invitations to the "upland fallows gray," and to the "pensive pleasures sweet." Swinburne says, with piquancy and truth, "Corot, on canvas, might have signed the 'Ode to Evening.'"
Dr. Johnson, who was a strong friend of Collins, tells us, in his Lives of the Poets, that he died in 1756; and that story is repeated by most early biographies; the truth is, however, that after that date he was living—only a sort of death in life, under the care of his sister at Chichester; and it was not until 1759, when—his moral and physical wreck complete—the end came.
Miss Burney.
Miss Burney.
We have next to bring to your notice, a clever, somewhat frisky, débonnaire young person of the other sex, whom you should know—whom perhaps you do know; I mean Miss Frances Burney.[[7]] You will remember that we have encountered her once before pushing her kindly way into old Dr. Johnson's ante-room when he was near to death. The old gentleman had known intimately her father, Dr. Burney, and had always shown for her a strong attachment; so did a great many of Dr. Burney's acquaintances, Garrick among them and Burke; and it was probably from such men and their talk that she caught the literary bee in her bonnet and wrote her famous story of Evelina. You should read that story—whatever you may do with Cecilia and other later ones—if only to see how good and cleanly a piece of work in the way of a society novel can come out of those broiling times, when Humphrey Clinker and Tom Jones and the prurient and sentimental languors of Richardson were on the toilette tables of the clever and the honest.
The book of Evelina is, all over, Miss Burney; that gives it the rarest and best sort of realism. Through all her work indeed, we have this over-jubilant and gushing, yet timid and diffident young lady, writing her stories—with all her timidities and large, unspoken hopes, tumbling and twittering in the bosoms of her heroines: if my lady has the fidgets, the fidgets come into her books; and you can always chase back the tremors that smite from time to time the fair Evelina, to the kindred tremors that afflict the clever and sensitive daughter of old Dr. Burney.
The book was published anonymously at first, and the secret of authorship tolerably well kept; she says her papa did not know; but young ladies are apt to put too small a limit to the knowledge of their papas! It is very certain that her self-consciousness, and tremulous, affected, simpers of ignorance, were not good to stave away suspicion. It was not long before the world, confounding book and person, came to call her "Evelina."