otions which were gradually
passing in his mind; those passions which first moulded his genius,
and which afterwards broke it! But who could record the vacillations
of a poetic temper, its early hope and its late despair, its wild
gaiety and its settled frenzy, but the poet himself? Yet Collins has
left behind no memorial of the wanderings of his alienated mind but
the errors of his life!

At college he published his "Persian Eclogues," as they were first
called, to which, when he thought they were not distinctly Persian, he
gave the more general title of "Oriental." The publication was
attended with no success; but the first misfortune a poet meets will
rarely deter him from incurring more. He suddenly quitted the
university, and has been censured for not having consulted his friends
when he rashly resolved to live by the pen. But he had no friends! His
father had died in embarrassed circumstances; and Collins was residing
at the university on the stipend allowed him by his uncle, Colonel
Martin, who was abroad. He was indignant at a repulse he met with at
college; and alive to the name of author and poet, the ardent and
simple youth imagined that a nobler field of action opened on him in
the metropolis than was presented by the flat uniformity of a
collegiate life. To whatever spot the youthful poet flies, that spot
seems Parnassus, as applause seems patronage. He hurried to town, and
presented himself before the cousin who paid his small allowance from
his uncle in a fashionable dress with a feather in his hat. The graver
gentleman did not succeed in his attempt at sending him back, with all
the terror of his information, that Collins had not a single guinea of
his own, and was dressed in a coat he could never pay for. The young
bard turned from his obdurate cousin as "a dull fellow;" a usual
phrase with him to describe those who did not think as he would have
them.

That moment was now come, so much desired, and scarcely yet dreaded,
which was to produce those effusions of fancy and learning, for which
Collins had prepared himself by previous studies. About this time
Johnson[126] has given a finer picture of the intellectual powers and
the literary attainments of Collins than in the life he afterwards
composed. "Collins was acquainted not only with the learned tongues,
but with the Italian, French, and Spanish languages; full of hopes and
full of projects, versed in many languages, high in fancy, and strong
in re