Johnson’s final estimate of Gray is not unfair, and we can leave the poet with it: “His mind had a large grasp; his curiosity was unlimited, and his judgment cultivated; he was likely to love much where he loved at all, but he was fastidious and hard to please.”
2. William Collins (1721–59). Collins was born at Chichester, and was educated at Winchester and Oxford, but all his life he was weighted with the curse of insanity, and for this reason he had to take untimely leave of the university. He tried to follow a literary career in London, but with scant success, being arrested for debt. He was released by the generosity of his publishers, and a fortunate legacy relieved him from the worst of his financial terrors. He lapsed into a mild species of melancholia, finally dying in his native city at the early age of thirty-eight.
The work of Collins is very small in bulk, and even of this scanty stock a fair proportion shows only mediocre ability. His Persian Eclogues (1742) are in the conventional style of Pope, and though they profess to deal with Persian scenes and characters, the Oriental setting shows no special information or inspiration. The book that gives him his place in literature is his Odes (1747), a small octavo volume of fifty-two pages. The work is a collection of odes to Pity, Fear, Simplicity, Patriotism, and kindred abstract subjects. Some of the odes are overweighted with the cumbrous creaking machinery of the Pindaric; but the best of them, especially the Ode to Evening (done in unrhymed verse), are instinct with a sweet tenderness, a subdued and shadowy pathos, and a magical enchantment of phrase. In the same book two short elegies, one beginning “How sleep the brave” and the other on James Thomson (“In yonder grave a Druid lies”), are as captivating, with their misty lights and murmuring echoes of melancholy, as the best of Keats. In the finest work of Collins, with his eager and wistful searching, with what Johnson morosely called his “flights of imagination that pass the bounds of nature,” we are ushered over the threshold of romance.
3. William Cowper (1731–1800). Cowper was born at Great Berkhampstead, in Hertfordshire, where his father was rector. He was to have been a barrister, and was actually called to the Bar (1754), but a great and morbid timidity of disposition, which increased till it became religious and suicidal mania, hampered him cruelly through life. Family influence obtained for him a good post on the clerical staff of the House of Lords, but his extreme shyness made him quite unfit for this semi-public appointment. The consequent disappointment disordered his wits, and he attempted suicide, but was fortunately prevented. The latter part of his life was spent chiefly at Olney, in Buckinghamshire, where his good friends the Unwins treated him with great kindness and good sense. His feeling of gratitude for their care, expressed or implicit in many of his poems and letters, is one of the most touching features in the literature of the time. This comparatively happy state of affairs did not last till the end, for the years immediately preceding his death were much clouded with extreme mental and bodily affliction.
Cowper’s poems were produced late in life, but in bulk the work is large. It is curiously mixed and attractive in its nature. His Poems (1782) is his first attempt at authorship. The book contains little that is noteworthy. The bulk of it is taken up with a collection of set pieces in heroic couplets, quite in the usual manner, on such subjects as The Progress of Error, Truth, Hope, and Charity. At the very end of the volume a few miscellaneous short pieces are more encouraging as novelties. One of them is the well-known poem containing the reflections of Alexander Selkirk (“I am monarch of all I survey”). His next work is The Task (1785), a long poem in blank verse, dealing with simple and familiar themes and containing many fine descriptions of country scenes. In places the style is marked by the prevailing artificial tricks, and as a whole the poem is seldom inspired with any deep or passionate feeling; but his observation is acute and humane, it includes the homeliest detail within its kindly scope, and he gives us real nature, like Thomson in The Seasons. At the end of this volume the ballad of John Gilpin finds a place. It is an excellent example of Cowper’s prim but sprightly humor, an extraordinary gift for a man of his morbid temperament. Other short poems were added to later editions of his first volume. These include the Epitaph on a Hare, curiously and touchingly pathetic; lines On the Receipt of my Mother’s Picture, which reveal only too painfully the suppressed convulsions of grief and longing that were stirred within him by memories of the past; and The Castaway, written in a lucid interval just before the end, and sounding like the wail of a damned spirit. The poem gives a tragic finality to his life. It describes the doom of a poor wretch swept overboard in a storm, and concludes:
No poet wept him; but the page
Of narrative sincere,
That tells his name, his worth, his age,
Is wet with Anson’s tear;
And tears by bards or heroes shed