d Hope on Reason's sovereign throne,
Then closed the scene, in darkness and despair.
Of all her gifts, of all her powers possest,
Let not her flattery win thy youthful ear,
Nor vow long faith to such a various guest,
False at the last, tho' now perchance full dear;
The casual lover with her charms is blest,
But woe to them her magic bands that wear!

The criticism of Johnson on the poetry of Collins, that "as men are
often esteemed who cannot be loved, so the poetry of Collins may
sometimes extort praise when it gives little pleasure," might
almost have been furnished by the lumbering pen of old Dennis. But
Collins from the poetical never _extorts_ praise, for it is given
_spontaneously_; he is much _more loved_ than _esteemed_, for he
does not give _little pleasure_. Johnson, too, describes his
"lines as of slow motion, clogged and impeded with clusters of
consonants." Even this verbal criticism, though it appeals to the
eye, and not to the ear, is false criticism, since Collins is
certainly the most musical of poets. How could that lyrist be harsh
in his diction, who almost draws tears from our eyes, while his
melodious lines and picturing epithets are remembered by his readers?
He is devoured with as much enthusiasm by one party as he is
imperfectly relished by the other.

Johnson has given two characters of this poet; the one composed at a
period when that great critic was still susceptible of the seduction
of the imagination; but even in this portrait, though some features of
the poet are impressively drawn, the likeness is incomplete, for there
is not even a slight indication of the chief feature in Collins's
genius, his tenderness and delicacy of emotion, and his fresh and
picturesque creative strokes. Nature had denied to Johnson's robust
intellect the perception of these poetic qualities. He was but a
stately ox in the fields of Parnassus, not the animal of nature. Many
years afterwards, during his poetical biography, that long Lent of
criticism, in which he mortified our poetical feeling by accommodating
his to the populace of critics--so faint were former recollections,
and so imperfect were even those feelings which once he seemed to have
possessed--that he could then do nothing but write on Collins with
much less warmth than he has written on Blackmore. Johnson is, indeed,
the first of critics, when his powerful logic investigates objects
submitted to reason; but great sense is not a