ily amused, and Thomas, by all accounts, not unfrequently
dirty, or at least slovenly in his dress, and careless and unpolished in
his manners, and rather inclined to broad humor and low society.

Romantically speaking, the work of these Miltonic lyrists marks an
advance upon that of the descriptive and elegiac poets, Thomson,
Akenside, Dyer, and Shenstone. Collins is among the choicest of English
lyrical poets. There is a flute-like music in his best odes--such as the
one "To Evening," and the one written in 1746--"How sleep the brave,"
which are sweeter, more natural, and more spontaneous than Gray's. "The
Muse gave birth to Collins," says Swinburne; "she did but give suck to
Gray." Collins "was a solitary song-bird among many more or less
excellent pipers and pianists. He could put more spirit of color into a
single stroke, more breath of music into a single note, than could all
the rest of the generation into all the labors of their lives."[26]
Collins, like Gray, was a Greek scholar, and had projected a history of
the revival letters. There is a classical quality in his verse--not
classical in the eighteenth-century sense--but truly Hellenic; a union,
as in Keats, of Attic form with romantic sensibility; though in Collins,
more than in Keats, the warmth seems to comes from without; the statue of
a nymph flushed with sunrise. "Collins," says Gosse, "has the touch of a
sculptor; his verse is clearly cut and direct: it is marble pure, but
also marble cold."[27] Lowell, however, thinks that Collins "was the
first to bring back into poetry something of the antique flavor, and
found again the long-lost secret of being classically elegant without
being pedantically cold."[28]

These estimates are given for what they are worth. The coldness which is
felt--or fancied--in some of Collins' poetry comes partly from the
abstractness of his subjects and the artificial style which he inherited,
in common with all his generation. Many of his odes are addressed to
Fear, Pity, Mercy, Liberty, and similar abstractions. The
pseudo-Pindaric ode, is, in itself, an exotic; and, as an art form, is
responsible for some of the most tumid compositions in the history of
English verse. Collins' most current ode, though by no means his best
one, "The Passions," abounds in those personifications which, as has been
said, constituted, in eighteenth century poetry, a sort of feeble
mythology: "wan Despair," "dejected Pity," "brown Exer