With respect to the utility of this figurative writing, the same arguments that have been advanced in favour of descriptive poetry will be of weight likewise here. It is, indeed, from impersonation, or, as it is commonly termed, personification, that poetical description borrows its chief powers and graces. Without the aid of this, moral and intellectual painting would be flat and unanimated, and even the scenery of material objects would be dull, without the introduction of fictitious life.
These observations will be most effectually illustrated by the sublime and beautiful odes that occasioned them; in those it will appear how happily this allegorical painting may be executed by the genuine powers of poetical genius, and they will not fail to prove its force and utility by passing through the imagination to the heart.
ODE TO PITY.
| “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!” |
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:
| 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. |
The “eyes of dewy light” is one of the happiest 125 strokes of imagination, and may be ranked among those expressions which
| “––give us back the image of the mind.” |