leaps rosy out of his bubbling genius. In a more
intensified signification than it is probable that Shakespeare dreamed
of, Shelley gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Here
afresh he touches the Metaphysical School, whose very title was drawn
from this habitual pursuit of abstractions, and who failed in that
pursuit from the one cause omnipresent with them, because in all their
poetic smithy they had left never a place for a forge. They laid their
fancies chill on the anvil. Crashaw, indeed, partially anticipated
Shelley's success, and yet further did a later poet, so much further that
we find it difficult to understand why a generation that worships Shelley
should be reviving Gray, yet almost forget the name of Collins. The
generality of readers, when they know him at all, usually know him by his
_Ode on the Passions_. In this, despite its beauty, there is still a
_soupcon_ of formalism, a lingering trace of powder from the eighteenth
century periwig, dimming the bright locks of poetry. Only the literary
student reads that little masterpiece, the _Ode to Evening_, which
sometimes heralds the Shelleian strain, while other passages are the sole
things in the language comparable to the miniatures of _Il Penseroso_.
Crashaw, Collins, Shelley--three ricochets of the one pebble, three jets
from three bounds of the one Pegasus! Collins's Pity, "with eyes of dewy
light," is near of kin to Shelley's Sleep, "the filmy-eyed"; and the
"shadowy tribes of mind" are the lineal progenitors of "Thought's crowned
powers." This, however, is personification, wherein both Collins and
Shelley build on Spenser: the dizzying achievement to which the modern
poet carried personification accounts for but a moiety, if a large
moiety, of his vivifying power over abstractions. Take the passage
(already alluded to) in that glorious chorus telling how the Hours come

From the temples high
Of man's ear and eye
Roofed over Sculpture and Poesy,

* * * * *

From those skiey towers
Where Thought's crowned powers
Sit watching your dance, ye happy Hours!
Our feet now, every palm,
Are sandalled with calm,
And the dew of our wings is a rain of balm;
And beyond our eyes
The human love lies
Which makes all it gazes on Paradise.

Any partial explanation will break in our hands before it reaches the
root of such a power. The root, we take it, is this. He had an
i