cise," and "Music
sphere-descended maid." It was probably the allegorical figures in
Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," "Sport that wrinkled care
derides," "spare Fast that oft with gods doth diet," etc., that gave a
new lease of life to this obsolescent machinery which the romanticists
ought to have abandoned to the Augustan schools.

The most interesting of Collins' poems, from the point of view of these
inquiries, is his "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of
Scotland." This was written in 1749, but as it remained in manuscript
till 1788, it was of course without influence on the minds of its
author's contemporaries. It had been left unfinished, and some of the
printed editions contained interpolated stanzas which have since been
weeded away. Inscribed to Mr. John Home, the author of "Douglas," its
purpose was to recommend to him the Scottish fairy lore as a fit subject
for poetry. Collins justifies the selection of such "false themes" by
the example of Spenser, of Shakspere, (in "Macbeth"), and of Tasso

"--whose undoubting mind
Believed the magic wonders which he sung."

He mentions, as instances of popular beliefs that have poetic
capabilities, the kelpie, the will-o'-the-wisp, and second sight. He
alludes to the ballad of "Willie Drowned in Yarrow," and doubtless with a
line of "The Seasons" running in his head,[29] conjures Home to "forget
not Kilda's race," who live on the eggs of the solan goose, whose only
prospect is the wintry main, and among whose cliffs the bee is never
heard to murmur. Perhaps the most imaginative stanza is the ninth,
referring to the Hebrides, the chapel of St. Flannan and the graves of
the Scottish, Irish, and Norwegian kings in Icolmkill:

"Unbounded is thy range; with varied skill
Thy muse may, like those feathery tribes which spring
From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing,
Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle,
To that hoar pile which still its ruins shows;
In whose small vaults a pygmy folk is found,
Whose bones the delver with his spade upthrows,
And culls them, wondering, from the hallowed ground;
Or thither, where, beneath the showery west,
The mighty kings of three fair realms are laid;
Once foes, perhaps, together now they rest,
No slaves revere them and no wars invade.
Yet frequent now at midnight's solemn hour,
The rifted mounds their yawn