those who have the endowment of a
brilliant fancy, because it gratifies their taste, selection, and
sentiment. Delightful, therefore, as it is to look upon a Claude, it is
more delightful to look upon this description. It is vain to attempt to
analyse the charm of this Ode; it is so subtle, that it escapes
analysis. Its harmony is so perfect, that it requires no rhyme: the
objects are so happily chosen, and the simple epithets convey ideas and
feelings so congenial to each other, as to throw the reader into the
very mood over which the personified being so beautifully designed
presides. No other poem on the same subject has the same magic. It
assuredly suggested some images and a tone of expression to Gray in his
Elegy.

The Ode on the Poetical Character is here and there a little involved
and obscure; but its general conception is magnificent, and beaming that
spirit of inventive enthusiasm, which alone can cherish the poet's
powers, and bring forth the due fruits. Collins never touched the lyre
but he was borne away by the inspiration under which he laboured. The
Dirge in Cymbeline, the lines on Thomson, and the Ode on Colonel Ross
breathe such a beautiful simplicity of pathos, and yet are so highly
poetical and graceful in every thought and tone, that, exquisitely
polished as they are, and without one superfluous or one prosaic word,
they never once betray the artifices of composition. The extreme
transparency of the words and thoughts would induce a vulgar reader to
consider them trite, while they are the expression of a genius so
refined as to be all essence of spirit. In Gray, excellent as he is, we
continually encounter the marks of labour and effort, and occasional
crudeness, which shows that effort had not always succeeded, such as
"iron hand and torturing hour;" but nothing of this kind occurs in the
principal poems of Collins. There is a fire of mind which supersedes
labour, and produces what labour cannot. It has been said that Collins
is neither sublime nor pathetic; but only ingenious and fanciful. The
truth is, that he was cast in the very mould of sublimity and pathos. He
lived in an atmosphere above the earth, and breathed only in a visionary
world. He was conversant with nothing else, and this must have been the
secret by which he produced compositions so entirely spiritual. He who
has daily intercourse with the world, and feels the vulgar human
passions, cannot be in a humour to write poems which do