Gray's personifications can scarcely be called allegorical, they have so
much of humanity about them. He dealt in all the noble and melancholy
feelings of the human heart: he never for one moment forgot to be a
moralist: he was constantly under the influence of powerful sympathy for
the miseries of man's life; and wrote from the overflow of his bosom
rather than of his imagination. It is true that his imagination
presented the pictures to him; but it was his heart which impelled him
to speak. Take the Ode on the Prospect of Eton College; there is not one
word which did not break from the bottom of his heart. The multitude
cannot enter into the visionary world of Collins: all who have a spark
of virtuous human feelings can sympathize with Gray. It is impossible to
deny that of these two beautiful poets Gray is the most instructive as a
moralist; but Gray is not so original as Collins, not so inventive, not
so perfect in his language, and has not so much the fire and flow of
inspiration.

When Collins is spoken of as one of the _minor_ poets, it is a sad
misapplication of the term. Unless he be minor because the number and
size of his poems is small, no one is less a minor poet. In him every
word is poetry, and poetry either sublime or pathetic. He does not rise
to the sublimity of Milton or Dante, or reach the graceful tenderness of
Petrarch; but he has a visionary invention of his own, to which there is
no rival. As long as the language lasts, every richly gifted and richly
cultivated mind will read him with intense and wondering rapture; and
will not cease to entertain the conviction, from his example, if from no
other, that true poetry of the higher orders is real inspiration.

It will occur to many readers, on perusing these passages of exalted
praise, that Johnson has spoken of Collins in a very different manner.
Almost fifty years have elapsed since Johnson's final criticism on him
appeared in his Lives of the Poets. It disgusted me so much at the time,
and the disgust continued so violent, that for a long period it blinded
me to all his stupendous merits, because it evinced not only bad taste
but unamiable feelings. I cannot yet either justify it, or account for
it. He speaks of Collins having sought for splendour without attaining
it--of clogging his lines with consonants, and of mistaking inversion of
language for poetry. Not one of these faults belongs to Collins. In
almost all his poems the words follow the