"His cypress wreath my meed decree,
And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee."

But, in general, Collins is much less slavish than Warton in his
imitation.

Joseph Warton's younger brother, Thomas, wrote in 1745, and published in
1747, "The Pleasures of Melancholy," a blank-verse poem of three hundred
and fifteen lines, made up, in nearly equal parts, of Milton and
Akenside, with frequent touches of Thomson, Spenser, and Pope's "Epistle
of Eloisa to Abelard." Warton was a lad of seventeen when his poem was
written: it was published anonymously and was by some attributed to
Akenside, whose "Pleasures of Imagination" (1744) had, of course,
suggested the title. A single extract will suffice to show how well the
young poet knew his Milton:

"O lead me, queen sublime, to solemn glooms
Congenial with my soul; to cheerless shades,
To ruined seats, to twilight cells and bowers,
Where thoughtful Melancholy loves to muse,
Her favorite midnight haunts. . .
Beneath yon ruined abbey's moss-grown piles
Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve,
When through some western window the pale moon
_Pours her long-levelled rule streaming light:_
While sullen sacred silence reigns around,
Save the lone screech-owl's note, who build his bower
Amid the moldering caverns dark and damp;[12]
Or the calm breeze, that rustles in the leaves
Of flaunting ivy, that with mantle green
Invests some wasted tower. . .
Then when the sullen shades of evening close
Where _through the room_ a blindly-glimmering gloom
The _dying embers_ scatter, far remote
From Mirth's mad shouts, that through the illumined roof
Resound with festive echo, let me sit
Blessed with the lowly cricket's drowsy dirge. . .
This sober hour of silence will unmask
False Folly's smile, that like the dazzling spells
Of wily Comus cheat the unweeting eye
With _blear illusion,_ and persuade to drink
That charmed cup which _Reason's mintage fair_
_ Unmoulds_, and stamps the monster on the man."

I italicize the most direct borrowings, but both the Wartons had so
saturated themselves with Milton's language, verse, and imagery that they
ooze out of them at every pore. Thomas Warton's poems, issued separately
from time to time, were first published collectively in 1777. They are
all imitative, and most of them imitative of Milton. His two best odes,
"On the First of April"