The central figure is still the same evanescent being, the vision of a maiden, endowed with all the grace of beauty and dignity, into whose lap “sallow Autumn” is pouring his falling leaves, or who now goes her way slowly through the tempest, while Winter, yelling through the troublous air Affrights thy shrinking train, And rudely rends thy robe. If we had no other evidence before us, Collins’s use of personified abstraction would be sufficient in itself to announce that the new poetry had begun. He makes use of the device as freely, and even now and then as mechanically, as the inferior versifiers of his period, but instead of the bloodless abstractions, his genius enabled him to present human qualities and states in almost ethereal form. Into them he has breathed such poetic life and inspiration that in their suggestive beauty and felicity of expression they stand as supreme examples of personification used as a legitimate poetical device, as distinct from a mere rhetorical figure or embellishment. This cannot be said of Gray, in whose verse mechanical personifications crowd so thickly that, as Coleridge observed in his remarks on the lines from “The Bard,” In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes Youth at the prow and Pleasure at the helm it depends “wholly on the compositors putting or not putting a small Capital, both in this and in many other passages of the same poet, whether the words should be personifications or mere abstractions.”[224] It is difficult to account for this devotion of Gray to the “new Olympus,” thickly crowded with “moral deities” that his age had brought into being, except on the assumption that contemporary usage in this respect was too strong for him to resist. For it cannot be denied that very many of the beings that swarm in his odes do not differ in their essential character from the mechanical figures worked to death by the ode-makers of his days; even his genius was not able to clothe them all in flesh and blood. In the “Eton College” ode there is a whole stanza given over to a conventional catalogue of the “fury passions,” the “vultures of the mind”; and similar thin abstractions people all the other odes. Nothing is visualized: we see no real image before us.[225] Even the famous “Elegy” is not without its examples of stiff personification, though they are not present in anything like the excess found elsewhere. The best that can be said for abstractions of this kind is that in their condensation they represent an economy of expression that is not without dignity and effectiveness, and they thus sometimes give an added emphasis to the sentiment, as in the oft-quoted Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys and destiny secure, Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor.