Collins is a writer of a very different stamp, who had perhaps less general power of mind than Young; but he had that true vivida vis, that genuine inspiration, which alone can give birth to the highest efforts of poetry.  He leaves stings in the minds of his readers, certain traces of thought and feelings which never wear out, because nature had left them in his own mind.  He is the only one of the minor poets of whom, if he had lived, it cannot be said that he might not have done the greatest things.  The germ is there.  He is sometimes affected, unmeaning, and obscure; but he also catches rich glimpses of the bowers of Paradise, and has lofty aspirations after the highest seats of the Muses.  With a great deal of tinsel and splendid patch-work, he has not been able to hide the solid sterling ore of genius.  In his best works there is an attic simplicity, a pathos, and fervour of imagination, which make us the more lament that the efforts of his mind were at first depressed by neglect and pecuniary embarrassment, and at length buried in the gloom of an unconquerable and fatal malady.  How many poets have gone through all the horrors of poverty and contempt, and ended their days in moping melancholy or moody madness!

      “We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
      But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.”

Is this the fault of themselves, of nature in tempering them of too fine a clay, or of the world, that spurner of living, and patron of dead merit?  Read the account of Collins—­with hopes frustrated, with faculties blighted, at last, when it was too late for himself or others, receiving the deceitful favours of relenting Fortune, which served only to throw their sunshine on his decay, and to light him to an early grave.  He was found sitting with every spark of imagination extinguished, and with only the faint traces of memory and reason left —­with only one book in his room, the Bible; “but that,” he said, “was the best.”  A melancholy damp hung like an unwholesome mildew upon his faculties—­a canker had consumed the flower of his life.  He produced works of genius, and the public regarded them with scorn:  he aimed at excellence that should be his own, and his friends treated his efforts as the wanderings of fatuity.  The proofs of his capacity are, his Ode on Evening, his Ode on the Passions (particularly the fine personification of Hope), his Ode to Fear, the Dirge in Cymbeline, the Lines on Thomson’s Grave, and his Eclogues, parts of which are admirable.  But perhaps his Ode on the Poetical Character is the best of all.  A rich distilled perfume emanates from it like the breath of genius; a golden cloud envelopes it; a honeyed paste of poetic diction encrusts it, like the candied coat of the auricula.  His Ode to Evening shews equal genius in the images and versification.  The sounds steal slowly over the ear, like the gradual coming on of evening itself: 

      “If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song
      May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,
          Like thy own solemn springs,
          Thy springs and dying gales,