ing cells unfold,
And forth the monarchs stalk with sovereign power,
In pageant robes, and wreathed with sheeny gold,
And on their twilight tombs aerial council hold."

Collins' work was all done by 1749; for though he survived ten years
longer, his mind was in eclipse. He was a lover and student of
Shakspere, and when the Wartons paid him a last visit at the time of his
residence with his sister in the cloisters of Chichester Cathedral, he
told Thomas that he had discovered the source of the "Tempest," in a
novel called "Aurelio and Isabella," printed in 1588 in Spanish, Italian,
French, and English. No such novel has been found, and it was seemingly
a figment of Collins' disordered fancy. During a lucid interval in the
course of this visit, he read to the Wartons, from the manuscript, his
"Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands"; and also a poem
which is lost, entitled, "The Bell of Arragon," founded on the legend of
the great bell of Saragossa that tolled of its own accord whenever a king
of Spain was dying.

Johnson was also a friend of Collins, and spoke of him kindly in his
"Lives of the Poets," though he valued his writings little. "He had
employed his mind chiefly upon works of fiction and subjects of fancy;
and by indulging some peculiar habits of thought, was eminently delighted
with those flights of imagination which pass the bounds of nature, and to
which the mind is reconciled only by a passive acquiescence in popular
traditions. He loved fairies, genii, giants, and monsters; he delighted
to rove through the meanders of enchantment, to gaze on the magnificence
of golden palaces, to repose by the water-falls of Elysian gardens. This
was, however, the character rather of his inclination than his genius;
the grandeur of wildness and the novelty of extravagance were always
desired by him, but were not always attained."[30]

Thomas Gray is a much more important figure than Collins in the
intellectual history of his generations; but this superior importance
does not rest entirely upon his verse, which is hardly more abundant than
Collins', though of a higher finish. His letters, journals, and other
prose remains, posthumously published, first showed how long an arc his
mind had subtended on the circle of art and thought. He was sensitive to
all fine influences that were in the literary air. One of the greatest
scholars among English poets, his taste was equal to his acquisit