JAMES THOMSON (1700-1748). Thomson belongs among the pioneers of Romanticism. Like Gray and Goldsmith, he wavered between Pseudo-classic and the new romantic ideals, and for this reason, if for no other, his early work is interesting, like the uncertainty of a child who hesitates whether to creep safely on all fours or risk a fall by walking. He is "worthy to be remembered" for three poems,--"Rule Britannia," which is still one of the national songs of England _The Castle of Indolence_, and _The Seasons_. The dreamy and romantic _Castle_ (1748), occupied by enchanter Indolence and his willing captives in the land of Drowsyhed, is purely Spenserian in its imagery, and is written in the Spenserian stanza. _The Seasons_ (1726- 1730), written in blank verse, describes the sights and sounds of the changing year and the poet's own feelings in the presence of nature. These two poems, though rather dull to a modern reader, were significant of the early romantic revival in three ways: they abandoned the prevailing heroic couplet; they went back to the Elizabethans, instead of to Pope, for their models; and they called attention to the long-neglected life of nature as a subject for poetry. WILLIAM COLLINS (1721-1759). Collins, the friend and disciple of Thomson, was of a delicate, nervous temperament, like Cowper; and over him also brooded the awful shadow of insanity. His first work, _Oriental Eclogues_ (1742), is romantic in feeling, but is written in the prevailing mechanical couplets. All his later work is romantic in both thought and expression. His "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands" (1750) is an interesting event in the romantic revival, for it introduced a new world, of witches, pygmies, fairies, and mediæval kings, for the imagination to play in. Collins's best known poems are the odes "To Simplicity," "To Fear," "To the Passions," the little unnamed lyric beginning "How sleep the brave," and the exquisite "Ode to Evening." In reading the latter, one is scarcely aware that the lines are so delicately balanced that they have no need of rime to accentuate their melody.