His Oriental Eclogues please by the simplicity of the colloquies, the choice figures of speech, and the fine descriptions of nature.  But of all his poems, the most finished and charming is the Ode to Evening.  It contains thirteen four-lined stanzas of varied metre, and in blank verse so full of harmony that rhyme would spoil it.  It presents a series of soft, dissolving views, and stands alone in English poetry, with claims sufficient to immortalize the poet, had he written nothing else.  The latter part of his life was clouded by mental disorders, not unsuggested to the reader by the pathos of many of his poems.  Like Gray, he wrote little, but every line is of great merit.

Henry Kirke White, 1785-1806:  the son of a butcher, this gifted youth displayed, in his brief life, such devotion to study, and such powers of mind, that his friends could not but predict a brilliant future for him, had he lived.  Nothing that he produced is of the highest order of poetic merit, but everything was full of promise.  Of a weak constitution, he could not bear the rigorous study which he prescribed to himself, and which hastened his death.  With the kind assistance of Mr. Capel Lofft and the poet Southey, he was enabled to leave the trade to which he had been apprenticed and go to Cambridge.  His poems have most of them a strongly devotional cast.  Among them are Gondoline, Clifton Grove, and the Christiad, in the last of which, like the swan, he chants his own death-song.  His memory has been kept green by Southey’s edition of his Remains, and by the beautiful allusion of Byron to his genius and his fate in The English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.  His sacred piece called The Star of Bethlehem has been a special favorite: 

    When marshalled on the nightly plain
      The glittering host bestud the sky,
    One star alone of all the train
      Can fix the sinner’s wandering eye.

Bishop Percy, 1728-1811:  Dr. Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore, deserves particular notice in a sketch of English Literature not so much for his own works,—­although he was a poet,—­as for his collection of ballads, made with great research and care, and published in 1765.  By bringing before the world these remains of English songs and idyls, which lay scattered through the ages from the birth of the language, he showed England the true wealth of her romantic history, and influenced the writers of the day to abandon the artificial and reproduce the natural, the simple, and the romantic.  He gave the impulse which produced the minstrelsy of Scott and the simple stories of Wordsworth.  Many of these ballads are descriptive of the border wars between England and Scotland; among the greatest favorites are Chevy Chase, The Battle of Otterburne, The Death of Douglas, and the story of Sir Patrick Spens.