There is much benevolence in his poetry, much feeling for the miseries and wrongs of mankind, but no perception of that deeper mystery—that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain, waiting for a deliverance. Neither is there any sense of the relation of the creation to the Creator other than that which the somewhat mechanical conception of a maker and a machine supply. Perhaps it is not to be wondered at that Thomson does not seem to feel the inadequacy of this conception, for we in our own day, who have got to feel so profoundly its inadequacy, have not as yet gone far to supply its place with a worthier. Yet whatever may be his shortcomings, all honor to the poet of the “Seasons”! Genuine lover of the country as he was, he was the first English poet who led poetry back into the fields, and made her once more free of her own native region. CHAPTER XIII. NATURE IN COLLINS, GRAY, GOLDSMITH, AND BURNS. COLLINS. When Thomson was laid in Richmond Church, another poet chanted over him a dirge breathing the very pathos of Nature herself:— “In yonder grave a Druid lies, Where slowly winds the stealing wave, The year’s best sweets shall duteous rise To deck its poet’s sylvan grave. “Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore, When Thames in summer wreaths is drest, And oft suspend the dashing oar To bid his gentle spirit rest.” About that ode of the gentle and pensive Collins (born 1721, died 1759) there is a sweet pathetic tone which the grander strains of later English poetry have never surpassed. In the “Dirge over Fidele” the same strain of pensive beauty is renewed. Collins was the first poet since Milton wrote his early lyrics who brought to the description of rural things that perfection of style, that combined simplicity and beauty, which Milton had learned from the classic poets There is another poem of Collins’s which, if not so perfect in expression as the two just named, is interesting as almost the earliest inroad by an English poet into the wild and romantic world which the Highlands of Scotland contain, unless we except Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” This is Collins’s ode on the “Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland.” It seems that in the autumn of 1749, Home, the author of the tragedy of “Douglas,” had, when on a visit to London, during his brief stay made the acquaintance of Collins, and kindled his imagination with tales of the Highlands and the Hebrides. Collins seems to have deepened this interest by the perusal of Martin’s curious book on the Western Isles, and on Home’s return to Scotland Collins addressed to him the ode, in which the English poet entered with a deeper, more imaginative insight into the weird and wild superstitions of the Gael than any Scottish poet had as yet shown. After describing with great force and truthfulness the second sight, the wraith, the water-kelpie, and many such-like things, he closes with this apostrophe:—