by their author,
allegorical.

With respect to the utility of this figurative writing, the same
arguments that have been advanced in favour of descriptive poetry will
be of weight likewise here. It is, indeed, from impersonation, or, as it
is commonly termed, personification, that poetical description borrows
its chief powers and graces. Without the aid of this, moral and
intellectual painting would be flat and unanimated, and even the scenery
of material objects would be dull, without the introduction of
fictitious life.

These observations will be most effectually illustrated by the sublime
and beautiful odes that occasioned them; in those it will appear how
happily this allegorical painting may be executed by the genuine powers
of poetical genius, and they will not fail to prove its force and
utility by passing through the imagination to the heart.

ODE TO PITY.

"By Pella's bard, a magic name,
By all the griefs his thoughts could frame,
Receive my humble rite:
Long, Pity, let the nations view
Thy sky-worn robes of tenderest blue,
And eyes of dewy light!"

The propriety of invoking Pity, through the mediation of Euripides, is
obvious.--That admirable poet had the keys of all the tender passions,
and therefore could not but stand in the highest esteem with a writer of
Mr. Collins's sensibility.--He did, indeed, admire him as much as Milton
professedly did, and probably for the same reasons; but we do not find
that he has copied him so closely as the last mentioned poet has
sometimes done, and particularly in the opening of Samson Agonistes,
which is an evident imitation of the following passage in the
Phoenissae:

~Hegou paroithe, thygater, hos typhlo podi
Ophthalmos ei su, nautiloisin astron hos?
Deur' eis to leuron pedon ichnos titheis' emon,
Probaine------~
Act. III. Sc. I.

The "eyes of dewy light" is one of the happiest strokes of imagination,
and may be ranked among those expressions which

"--give us back the image of the mind."

"Wild Arun too has heard thy strains,
And Echo, 'midst my native plains,
Been soothed by Pity's lute."

"There first the wren thy myrtles shed
On gentlest Otway's infant head."

Sussex, in which county the Arun is a small river, had the honour of
giving birth to Otway as well as to Collins: both these poets,
unhappily, became the objects of that pity by which their writings are
distingu