“All hail! ye scenes that o’er my soul prevail! Ye splendid friths and lakes, which, far away, Are by smooth Annan filled, or pastoral Tay, Or Don’s romantic springs, at distance hail! The time shall come, when I, perhaps, may tread Your lowly glens, o’erhung with spreading broom; Or, o’er your stretching heaths, by fancy led; Or, o’er your mountains creep, in awful gloom.” Poor Collins: this hope was never fulfilled. A deeper gloom than any that rests on the Highland mountains too soon gathered over him. The ode itself does not seem to have received the notice it deserves, both for its own excellence and as the first symptom of a new and enlarged feeling about Nature entering into English poetry. In the above extract the word “glen” occurs. Is there any earlier instance of its use in English poetry or prose? The Scottish poets, except the ballad-writers, were afraid to use it till the time of Scott. Macpherson in his translations of Ossian, twelve years later than this ode, uniformly renders the Gaelic “gleann” by the insipid “vale.” But the most perfect and original poem of Collins, as well as the most finely appreciative of Nature, is his Ode to Evening. No doubt evening is personified in his address as “maid composed,” and “calm votaress,” but the personification is so delicately handled, and in so subdued a tone, that it does not jar on the feelings, as such personifications too often do:— “If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song, May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear, Like thy own solemn springs, Thy springs and dying gales, “O nymph reserved, while now the bright-haired sun Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts, With brede ethereal wove, O’erhang his wavy bed: “Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat With short, shrill shriek, flits by on leathern wing; Or where the beetle winds His small but sullen horn, “As oft he rises ’midst the twilight path, Against the pilgrim borne in needless hum Now teach me, maid composed, To breathe some softened strain. ... “Then lead, calm votaress, 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, “And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires, And hears the simple bell, and marks o’er all, Thy dewy finger draw The gradual dusky veil.”