ves stings in the minds of his readers, certain
traces of thought and feelings which never wear out, because nature had
left them in his own mind. He is the only one of the minor poets of
whom, if he had lived, it cannot be said that he might not have done the
greatest things. The germ is there. He is sometimes affected, unmeaning,
and obscure; but he also catches rich glimpses of the bowers of
Paradise, and has lofty aspirations after the highest seats of the
Muses. With a great deal of tinsel and splendid patch-work, he has not
been able to hide the solid sterling ore of genius. In his best works
there is an attic simplicity, a pathos, and fervour of imagination,
which make us the more lament that the efforts of his mind were at first
depressed by neglect and pecuniary embarrassment, and at length buried
in the gloom of an unconquerable and fatal malady. How many poets have
gone through all the horrors of poverty and contempt, and ended their
days in moping melancholy or moody madness!

"We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness."

Is this the fault of themselves, of nature in tempering them of too fine
a clay, or of the world, that spurner of living, and patron of dead
merit? Read the account of Collins--with hopes frustrated, with
faculties blighted, at last, when it was too late for himself or others,
receiving the deceitful favours of relenting Fortune, which served only
to throw their sunshine on his decay, and to light him to an early
grave. He was found sitting with every spark of imagination
extinguished, and with only the faint traces of memory and reason left
--with only one book in his room, the Bible; "but that," he said, "was
the best." A melancholy damp hung like an unwholesome mildew upon his
faculties--a canker had consumed the flower of his life. He produced
works of genius, and the public regarded them with scorn: he aimed at
excellence that should be his own, and his friends treated his efforts
as the wanderings of fatuity. The proofs of his capacity are, his Ode on
Evening, his Ode on the Passions (particularly the fine personification
of Hope), his Ode to Fear, the Dirge in Cymbeline, the Lines on
Thomson's Grave, and his Eclogues, parts of which are admirable. But
perhaps his Ode on the Poetical Character is the best of all. A rich
distilled perfume emanates from it like the breath of genius; a golden
cloud envelopes it;