evsky. Collins, we cannot help feeling, says in it what he
does not really think. He glorifies fear as though it were the better part
of imagination, going so far as to end his ode with the lines:

O thou whose spirit most possessed,
The sacred seat of Shakespeare's breast!
By all that from thy prophet broke
In thy divine emotions spoke:
Hither again thy fury deal,
Teach me but once, like him, to feel;
His cypress wreath my meed decree,
And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee!

We have only to compare these lines with Claudio's terrible speech about
death in _Measure for Measure_ to see the difference between pretence and
passion in literature. Shakespeare had no fear of telling us what he knew
about fear. Collins lived in a more reticent century, and attempted to fob
off a disease on us as an accomplishment. What perpetually delights us in
the _Ode to Evening_ is that here at least Collins can tell the truth
without falsification or chilling rhetoric. Here he is writing of the
world as he has really seen it and been moved by it. He still makes use of
personifications, but they have been transmuted by his emotion into
imagery. In these exquisite formal unrhymed lines, Collins has summed up
his view and dream of life. One knows that he was not lying or bent upon
expressing any other man's experiences but his own when he described how
the

Air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat,
With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing,
Or where the beetle winds
His small but sullen horn.

He speaks here, not in the stiffness of rhetoric, but in the liberty of a
new mood, never, for all he knew or cared, expressed before. As far as all
the rest of his work is concerned, his passion for style is more or less
wasted. But the _Ode to Evening_ justifies both his pains and his
indolence. As for the pains he took with his work, we have it on the
authority of Thomas Warton that "all his odes ... had the marks of
repeated correction: he was perpetually changing his epithets." As for his
indolence, his uncle, Colonel Martin, thought him "too indolent even for
the Army," and advised him to enter the Church--a step from which he was
dissuaded, we are told, by "a tobacconist in Fleet Street." For the rest,
he was the son of a hatter, and went mad. He is said to have haunted the
cloisters of Chichester Cathedral during his fits of melancholia, and to
have uttered a strange accompaniment of groans a