“Unbounded is thy range; with varied skill
      Thy muse may, like those feathery tribes which spring
      From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing,
    Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle,
      To that hoar pile which still its ruins shows;
    In whose small vaults a pygmy folk is found,
      Whose bones the delver with his spade upthrows,
    And culls them, wondering, from the hallowed ground;
    Or thither, where, beneath the showery west,
      The mighty kings of three fair realms are laid;
    Once foes, perhaps, together now they rest,
      No slaves revere them and no wars invade. 
    Yet frequent now at midnight’s solemn hour,
      The rifted mounds their yawning 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]