ished. There was a similitude in their genius and in their
sufferings. There was a resemblance in the misfortunes and in the
dissipation of their lives; and the circumstances of their death cannot
be remembered without pain.

The thought of painting in the temple of Pity the history of human
misfortunes, and of drawing the scenes from the tragic muse, is very
happy, and in every respect worthy the imagination of Collins.

ODE TO FEAR.

Mr. Collins, who had often determined to apply himself to dramatic
poetry, seems here, with the same view, to have addressed one of the
principal powers of the drama, and to implore that mighty influence she
had given to the genius of Shakespeare:

"Hither again thy fury deal,
Teach me but once like him to feel:
His cypress wreath my meed decree,
And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee!"

In the construction of this nervous ode, the author has shown equal
power of judgment and imagination. Nothing can be more striking than the
violent and abrupt abbreviation of the measure in the fifth and sixth
verses, when he feels the strong influence of the power he invokes:

"Ah Fear! ah frantic Fear!
I see, I see thee near."

The editor of these poems has met with nothing in the same species of
poetry, either in his own, or in any other language, equal, in all
respects, to the following description of Danger:

"Danger whose limbs of giant mould
What mortal eye can fix'd behold?
Who stalks his round, an hideous form,
Howling amidst the midnight storm,
Or throws him on the ridgy steep
Of some loose hanging rock to sleep."

It is impossible to contemplate the image conveyed in the two last
verses, without those emotions of terror it was intended to excite. It
has, moreover, the entire advantage of novelty to recommend it; for
there is too much originality in all the circumstances, to suppose that
the author had in his eye that description of the penal situation of
Catiline in the ninth AEneid:

"------Te, Catilina, minaci
Pendentem scopulo."

The archetype of the English poet's idea was in Nature, and, probably,
to her alone he was indebted for the thought. From her, likewise, he
derived that magnificence of conception, that horrible grandeur of
imagery, displayed in the following lines:

"And those, the fiends, who, near allied,
O'er Nature's wounds and wrecks preside;
While Vengeance in the lurid air
Lifts her red arm, exposed and bare: