Who is there who would not rather have written a single ode of Gray’s than all the poetical works of Southey?  If voluminousness alone made a man a great writer, we should have to canonize Lord Lytton.  The truth is, literary genius has no rule either of voluminousness or of the opposite.  The genius of one writer is a world ever moving.  The genius of another is a garden often still.  The greatest genius is undoubtedly of the former kind.  But as there is hardly enough genius of this kind to fill a wall, much less a library, we may well encourage the lesser writers to cultivate their gardens, and, in the absence of the wilder tumult of creation, to delight us with blooms of leisurely phrase and quiet thought.

Gray and Collins were both writers who labored in little gardens.  Collins, indeed, had a small flower-bed—­perhaps only a pot, indeed—­rather than a garden.  He produced in it one perfect bloom—­the Ode to Evening.  The rest of his work is carefully written, inoffensive, historically interesting.  But his continual personification of abstract ideas makes the greater part of his verse lifeless as allegories or as sculpture in a graveyard.  He was a romantic, an inventor of new forms, in his own day.  He seems academic to ours.  His work is that of a man striking an attitude rather than of one expressing the deeps of a passionate nature.  He is always careful not to confess.  His Ode to Fear does not admit us to any of the secrets of his maniacal and melancholy breast.  It is an anticipation of the factitious gloom of Byron, not of the nerve-shattered gloom of Dostoevsky.  Collins, we cannot help feeling, says in it what he does not really think.  He glorifies fear as though it were the better part of imagination, going so far as to end his ode with the lines: 

  O thou whose spirit most possessed,
  The sacred seat of Shakespeare’s breast! 
  By all that from thy prophet broke
  In thy divine emotions spoke: 
  Hither again thy fury deal,
  Teach me but once, like him, to feel;
  His cypress wreath my meed decree,
  And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee!

We have only to compare these lines with Claudio’s terrible speech about death in Measure for Measure to see the difference between pretence and passion in literature.  Shakespeare had no fear of telling us what he knew about fear.  Collins lived in a more reticent century, and attempted to fob off a disease on us as an accomplishment.  What perpetually delights us in the Ode to Evening is that here at least Collins can tell the truth without falsification or chilling rhetoric.  Here he is writing of the world as he has really seen it and been moved by it.  He still makes use of personifications, but they have been transmuted by his emotion into imagery.  In these exquisite formal unrhymed lines, Collins has summed up his view and dream of life.  One knows that he was not lying or bent upon expressing any other man’s experiences but his own when he described how the