When Israel’s host, with all their stores,
  Passed through the ruby-tinctured crystal shores,
  The wilderness of waters and of land.

But these are rare.  His odes are founded upon those of Gray, and the best that can be said of them is that if they do not quite rise to the frozen elegance of Akenside, they seldom sink to the flaccidity of Mason.  Never, for one consecutive stanza or stroke, do they approach Collins or Gray in delicacy or power.  But the Song to David—­the lyric in 516 lines which Smart is so absurdly fabled to have scratched with a key on the white-washed walls of his cell—­this was a portent of beauty and originality.  Strange to say, it was utterly neglected when it appeared, and the editor of the 1791 edition of Smart’s works expressly omitted to print it on the ground that it bore too many “melancholy proofs of the estrangement of Smart’s mind” to be fit for republication.  It became rare to the very verge of extinction, and is now scarcely to be found in its entirety save in a pretty reprint of 1819, itself now rare, due to the piety of a Rev. R. Harvey.

It is obvious that Smart’s contemporaries and immediate successors looked upon the Song to David as the work of a hopelessly deranged person.  In 1763 poetry had to be very sane indeed to be attended to.  The year preceding had welcomed the Shipwreck of Falconer, the year to follow would welcome Goldsmith’s Traveller and Grainger’s Sugar Cane, works of various merit, but all eminently sane.  In 1763 Shenstone was dying and Rogers was being born.  The tidy, spruce, and discreet poetry of the eighteenth century was passing into its final and most pronounced stage.  The Song to David, with its bold mention of unfamiliar things, its warm and highly-coloured phraseology, its daring adjectives and unexampled adverbs, was an outrage upon taste, and one which was best accounted for by the tap of the forefinger on the forehead.  No doubt the poem presented and still may present legitimate difficulties.  Here, for instance, is a stanza which it is not for those who run to read: 

  Increasing days their reign exalt,
  Nor in the pink and mottled vault
    The opposing spirits tilt;
  And, by the coasting reader spy’d,
  The silverlings and crusions glide
    For Adoration gilt.

This is charming; but if it were in one of the tongues of the heathen we should get Dr. Verrall to explain it away.  Poor Mr. Harvey, the editor of 1819, being hopelessly puzzled by “silverlings,” the only dictionary meaning of which is “shekels,” explained “crusions” to be some other kind of money, from [Greek:  krousis].  But “crusions” are golden carp, and when I was a child the Devonshire fishermen used to call the long white fish with argent stripes (whose proper name, I think, is the launce) a silverling.  The “coasting reader” is the courteous reader when walking along the coast, and what he sees are