scholar, and had projected a history of the revival letters.  There is a classical quality in his verse—­not classical in the eighteenth-century sense—­but truly Hellenic; a union, as in Keats, of Attic form with romantic sensibility; though in Collins, more than in Keats, the warmth seems to comes from without; the statue of a nymph flushed with sunrise.  “Collins,” says Gosse, “has the touch of a sculptor; his verse is clearly cut and direct:  it is marble pure, but also marble cold."[27] Lowell, however, thinks that Collins “was the first to bring back into poetry something of the antique flavor, and found again the long-lost secret of being classically elegant without being pedantically cold."[28]

These estimates are given for what they are worth.  The coldness which is felt—­or fancied—­in some of Collins’ poetry comes partly from the abstractness of his subjects and the artificial style which he inherited, in common with all his generation.  Many of his odes are addressed to Fear, Pity, Mercy, Liberty, and similar abstractions.  The pseudo-Pindaric ode, is, in itself, an exotic; and, as an art form, is responsible for some of the most tumid compositions in the history of English verse.  Collins’ most current ode, though by no means his best one, “The Passions,” abounds in those personifications which, as has been said, constituted, in eighteenth century poetry, a sort of feeble mythology:  “wan Despair,” “dejected Pity,” “brown Exercise,” 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: