William Collins[5] was a man of a totally different stamp--better worth your knowing--yet maybe with the general public not so well known. {161} There is the chink of true and rare poetic metal in his verse, and it is fused by an imagination capable of intense heat and wonderful flame. He was only a hatter's boy from Chichester, in the South of England; was at Oxford for a while, and left there in a huff--though securing a degree, 1743; afterward went to London; wrote and printed some odes, which he knew were better than most current poetry, but which nobody bought or read. He sulked under that neglect, and his rage ran--sometimes to verse--sometimes to drink; he had known Thomson and Johnson, and both befriended him; but the world did not; indeed he never met the world half way; the poetic phrenzy in him so fined his sensibilities that he could not and would not put out a feeling hand for promiscuous greetings. Poverty, too, came in the wake of his poetic cultures, to aggravate his mental inaptitudes and his moral distractions--all ending at last in a mad-house. He was not, to be sure, continuously under restraint--such terrific restraints as belonged to treatment of the insane in that day; but for a half dozen or more years of the latter part of his life--wandering all awry--saying {162} weak and pointless things, in place of the odes which had coruscated under his fine fancy; lingering about his childhood's home; stealing under the cathedral vaults of Chichester (where his body rests now), and lifting up a vacant and wild treble of sound in dreary sing-song to mingle with the music from the choir. There are accomplished critics who insist that the odes of Collins carry in them the finest and the loftiest strains which go to marry the music of the nineteenth century poets to the music of the days of Elizabeth. Certain it is, that he loomed far above the ding-dong of such as Shenstone--that he scorned the classic trammels of the empire of Pope--certain that there were fires in him which were lighted by poets who lived before the time of the Stuarts, and which gave foretaste and promise of the freedom and the graces that shine to-day.[6] I cannot quote better to show his quality than {163} from that "Ode to Evening" which is so often cited:-- "For when thy folding star arising, shows His paly circlet at his warning lamp, The fragrant hours and elves Who slept in flowers the day, "And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with And sheds the freshning dew, and, lovelier still, The pensive pleasures sweet, Prepare thy shadowy car. "Then lead, calm votress, where some sheety lake Cheers the lone heath, or some time hallowed pile, Or upland fallows gray Reflect its last cool gleam. "But when chill, blustering winds or driving rain Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut That from the mountain's side, Views wilds and swelling floods,