who sitt’st a smiling bride By Valour’s armed and awful side Gentlest of sky-born forms and best adorned. The “Ode to the Passions” is in itself almost an epitome of the various ways in which Collins makes use of personification. It is first to be noted that he rarely attempts to clothe his personifications in long and elaborate descriptions; most often they are given life and reality by being depicted, so to speak, moving and acting: Revenge impatient rose, He threw his blood-stained sword in thunder down, And with a withering look The war-denouncing trumpet took; Yet still he kept his wild unaltered mien Whilst his strained ball of sight seemed bursting from his head. Even the figures, seen as it were but for a moment, are flashed before us in this manner: With woful measures wan Despair Low sullen sounds his grief beguiled and Dejected Pity at his side Her soul-subduing voice applied and the vision of hope with “eyes so fair” who smiled and waved her golden hair. In this ode Collins gives us also imaginative cameos, we might call them, vividly delineated and presented like the figures on the Grecian urn that inspired Keats. Thus: While as his flying fingers kissed the strings, Love framed with mirth a gay fantastic round. and, with its tinge of probably unconscious humour— Brown exercise rejoiced to hear, And Sport leapt up and seized his beechen spear. From these and similar instances, we receive a definite impression of that motion, which is at the same time repose, so characteristic of classical sculptuary. Most of the odes considered above are addressed to abstractions. In the few instances where Collins invokes the orders or powers of nature even greater felicity is shown in the art with which he calls up and clothes in perfect expression his abstract images. The first of the seasons is vaguely but subtly suggested to us in the beautiful ode beginning “How sleep the brave”: When Spring with dewy fingers cold Returns to deck their hallowed mould, She there shall dress a sweeter sod Than fancy’s feet have ever trod. This is rather a simile than a personification, but yet there is conveyed to us a definite impression of a shadowy figure that comes to deck the earth with beauty, like a young girl scattering flowers as she walks along. But the workmanship of Collins in this respect is seen in its perfection in the “Ode to Evening.” There is no attempt to draw a portrait or chisel a statue; the calm, restful influence of evening, its sights and sounds that radiate peace and contentment, even the very soul of the landscape as the shades of night gather around, are suggested by master touches, whilst the slow infiltration of the twilight is beautifully suggested: Thy dewy fingers draw The gradual dusky veil.