There may be badly-written
scenes in Shakespeare, and pot-house jokes, and wordy hyperboles, but with
all this there are enchanted continents left in him which we may continue
to explore though we live to be a hundred.

The fact that the noble impatience of a Shakespeare is above our
fault-finding, however, must not be used to disparage the lazy patience of
good writing. An AEschylus or a Shakespeare, a Browning or a Dickens,
conquers us with an abundance like nature's. He feeds us out of a horn, of
plenty. This, unfortunately, is possible only to writers of the first
order. The others, when they attempt profusion, become fluent rather than
abundant, facile of ink rather than generous of golden grain. Who does not
agree with Pope that Dryden, though not Shakespeare, would have been a
better poet if he had learned:

The last and greatest art--the art to blot?

Who is there who would not rather have written a single ode of Gray's than
all the poetical works of Southey? If voluminousness alone made a man a
great writer, we should have to canonize Lord Lytton. The truth is,
literary genius has no rule either of voluminousness or of the opposite.
The genius of one writer is a world ever moving. The genius of another is
a garden often still. The greatest genius is undoubtedly of the former
kind. But as there is hardly enough genius of this kind to fill a wall,
much less a library, we may well encourage the lesser writers to cultivate
their gardens, and, in the absence of the wilder tumult of creation, to
delight us with blooms of leisurely phrase and quiet thought.

Gray and Collins were both writers who labored in little gardens. Collins,
indeed, had a small flower-bed--perhaps only a pot, indeed--rather than a
garden. He produced in it one perfect bloom--the _Ode to Evening_. The
rest of his work is carefully written, inoffensive, historically
interesting. But his continual personification of abstract ideas makes the
greater part of his verse lifeless as allegories or as sculpture in a
graveyard. He was a romantic, an inventor of new forms, in his own day. He
seems academic to ours. His work is that of a man striking an attitude
rather than of one expressing the deeps of a passionate nature. He is
always careful not to confess. His _Ode to Fear_ does not admit us to any
of the secrets of his maniacal and melancholy breast. It is an
anticipation of the factitious gloom of Byron, not of the nerve-shattered
gloom of Dosto