who sitt’st a smiling bride
By Valour’s armed and awful side
Gentlest of sky-born forms and best adorned.
The “Ode to the Passions” is in itself almost an epitome of the various ways in which Collins makes use of personification. It is first to be noted that he rarely attempts to clothe his personifications in long and elaborate descriptions; most often they are given life and reality by being depicted, so to speak, moving and acting:
Revenge impatient rose,
He threw his blood-stained sword in thunder down,
And with a withering look
The war-denouncing trumpet took;
Yet still he kept his wild unaltered mien
Whilst his strained ball of sight seemed bursting from his head.