Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

How high does Melancholy swell!
Which sighs can more than language tell:
Till Love can only grieve or fear,
Reflect a while, then drop a tear

For all that's beautiful or dear.

WINTER SONG.

Ask me no more, my truth to prove,
What I would suffer for my love:
With thee I would in exile go,

To regions of eternal snow:
O'er floods by solid ice confined;

Through forest bare with Northern wind:
While all around my eyes I cast,
Where all is wild, and all is waste.
If there the timorous stag you chase,
Or rouse to fight a fiercer race,
Undaunted I thy arms would bear,
And give thy hand the hunter's spear,
When the low sun withdraws his light,
And menaces a half year's night,
The conscious moon, and stars above,
Shall guide me with my wandering love.
Beneath the mountain's hollow brow,
Or in its rocky cells below,

Thy rural feast I would provide;

Nor envy palaces their pride;

The softest moss should dress thy bed,

With savage spoils about thee spread:

While faithful Love the watch should keep,
To banish danger from thy sleep.

WILLIAM COLLINS. 1720-1756.

WILLIAM COLLINS, one of the very finest of English lyric poets, was born at Chichester, in the year 1720, and was educated at Oxford. In 1744 he repaired to London as a literary adventurer. He won the cordial regard of Johnson, then a needy laborer in the same vocation, who, in his "Lives of the Poets," has spoken of him with tenderness. He tells us that "his appearance was decent and manly, his knowledge considerable, his views extensive, his conversation elegant, and his disposition cheerful. He designed many works, but his great fault was irresolution; or the frequent calls of immediate necessity broke his scheme, and suffered him to pursue no settled purpose."

His odes were published on his own account in 1746; but being disappointed at the slowness of the sale, he is said to have burnt the copies that remained with his own hand. He was shortly relieved from his embarrassrients, by a legacy from an uncle of £2000: but worse evils than poverty soon

overclouded the rest of his life: he sunk gradually into a sort of melancholy, and died in 1756, in a state of helpless insanity.

"The works of Collins," says Campbell, "will abide comparison with whatever Milton wrote under the age of thirty. If they have rather less exuberant wealth of genius, they have more exquisite touches of pathos. Like Milton, he leads us into the haunted ground of imagination: like him, he has the rich economy of expression haloed with thought, which by single or few words often hints entire pictures to the imagination. A cloud of obscurity sometimes rests on his highest conceptions, arising from the fineness of his associations, and the daring sweep of his allusions; but the shadow is transitory, and interferes very little with the light of his imagery or the warinth of his feelings. His genius loved to breathe rather in the preternatural and ideal element of poetry, than in the atmosphere of imitation, which lies closest to real life. He carried sensibility and tenderness into the highest regions of abstracted thought: his enthusiasm spreads a glow even amongst the shadowy tribes of mind;' and his allegory is as sensible to the heart as it is visible to the fancy." 2

ODE TO FEAR.3

Thou, to whom the world unknown,
With all its shadowy shapes, is shown,
Who seest appall'd the unreal scene,
While Fancy lifts the veil between:
Ah, Fear! ah, frantic Fear!

I see I see thee near.

I know thy hurried step, thy haggard eye!
Like thee I start, like thee disorder'd fly,
For, lo, what monsters in thy train appear!
Danger, whose limbs of giant mould
What mortal eye can fix'd behold?
Who stalks his round, a hideous form,
Howling amidst the midnight storm,

1 "In the year 1756 died our lamented Collins; one of our most exquisite poets, and of whom, perhaps, without exaggeration, it may be asserted, that he partook of the credulity and enthusiasm of Tasso, the magic wildness of Shakspeare, the sublimity of Milton, and the pathos of Ossian."-Drake's Literary Hours.

"He had a wonderful combination of excellencies.

United to splendor and sublimity of imagination, he had a richness of erudition, a keenness of research, a nicety of taste, and an elegance and truth of moral reflection, which astonished those who had the luck to be intimate with him."-Sir E. Brydges.

2 "Of all our minor poets, that is, those who have attempted only short pieces, Collins is probably the one who has shown most of the highest qualities of poetry, and who excites the most intense interest in the bosom of the reader. He soars into the regions of imagination, and occupies the highest peaks of Parnassus. His fancy is glowing and vivid, but at the same time hasty and obscure. He has the true inspiration of the poet. He heats and melts objects in the fervor of his genius, as in a furnace."-Hazlitt.

3 Collins, who had often determined to apply himself to dramatic poetry, seems here, with the same view, to have addressed one of the principal powers of the drama, and to implore that mighty influ ence she had given to the genius of Shakspeare. In the construction of this nervous ode he has shown equal power of judgment and imagination. Nothing can be more striking than the violent and abrupt abbreviation of the measure in the fifth and sixth verses, when the poet seems to feel the strong influence of the power be invokes:

"Ah, Fear-ah, frantic Fear!

I see I see thee near."

Or throws him on the ridgy steep
Of some loose hanging rock to sleep:
And with him thousand phantoms join'd,
Who prompt to deeds accursed the mind:
And those, the fiends, who near allied,
O'er nature's wounds and wrecks preside;
While Vengeance, in the lurid air,
Lifts her red arm, exposed and bare:
On whom that ravening brood of fate,
Who lap the blood of Sorrow, wait;
Who, Fear, this ghastly train can see,
And look not madly wild, like thee?

EPODE.

In earliest Greece, to thee, with partial choice,
The grief-ful Muse addrest her infant tongue:
The maids and matrons, on her awful voice,

Silent and pale, in wild amazement hung.

Yet he, the Bard who first invoked thy name,
Disdain'd in Marathon its power to feel:

For not alone he nursed the poet's flame,

But reach'd from Virtue's hand the patriot's steel.

But who is he,2 whom later garlands grace,
Who left awhile o'er Hybla's3 dews to rove,
With trembling eyes thy dreary steps to trace,
Where thou and furies shared the baleful grove?

Wrapt in thy cloudy veil, th' incestuous Queen
Sigh'd the sad call her son and husband heard,
When once alone it broke the silent scene,

And he, the wretch of Thebes, no more appear'd.

O Fear, I know thee by my throbbing heart,

Thy withering power inspired each mournful line,
Though gentle Pity claim her mingled part,

Yet all the thunders of the scene are thine.

ANTISTROPHE.

Thou who such weary lengths hast past,
Where wilt thou rest, mad nymph, at last?
Say, wilt thou shroud in haunted cell,

Where gloomy Rape and Murder dwell?

Or in some hollow'd seat,

'Gainst which the big waves beat,

1 The Greek tragic poet, Eschylus, who was in the battle of Marathon, between the Athenians and Persians, B. C. 490.

2 Sophocles, another Greek dramatic poet.

8 Hybla was a mountain in Sicily, famous for its honey and bees.

4 Jocasta, the queen of Thebes, who, after the death of her husband Laius, married her own son Edipus (whom Collins here calls the "wretch") without knowing who he was. On this story is founded that most sublime and pathetic tragedy, the "Edipus Tyrannus" of Sophocles.

Hear drowning seamen's cries in tempests brought?
Dark power, with shuddering meek submitted thought,
Be mine, to read the visions old,

Which thy awakening bards have told;
And, lest thou meet my blasted view,
Hold each strange tale devoutly true;
Ne'er be I found, by thee o'erawed,
In that thrice-hallow'd eve1 abroad,
When ghosts, as cottage-maids believe,
Their pebbled beds permitted leave,
And goblins haunt from fire, or fen,
Or mine, or flood, the walks of men!
O thou, whose spirit most possest
The sacred seat of Shakspeare'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!

ODE TO EVENING.2

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;

O nymph reserved, while now the bright-hair'd sun
Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts,
With brede ethereal wove,

O'erhang his wavy bed:

Now air is hush'd, save where the weak-eyed bat,
With short shrill shriek, flits by on leathern wing,
Or where the beetle winds

His small but sullen horn,

As oft he rises, midst the twilight path,

Against the pilgrim, borne in heedless hum:

Now teach me, maid composed,

To breathe some soften'd strain,

1 He here alludes to the old superstitions connected with All-Hallow Even, or Hallow E'en-the last evening of October.

2 Though blank verse had been so successfully employed in English heroic measure by one of the greatest poets that ever lived, and made the vehicle of the noblest poem that ever was written, yet no one had introduced it into lyric poetry before Collins. That he is most happy and successful in the use of it, who can doubt after reading this exquisite "Ode to Evening," the imagery and enthu siasm of which must render it delightful to every reader of taste!

"Collins has given but one entire instance of reflecting the scenery of nature as from a poetical mirror. This is the Ode to Evening. Almost all else is the embodiment of intellect. But this single specimen is perfect in its way. There is not one idle epithet or ill-chosen image:-the novelty and happiness of combination show invention even here; though nature is neither added to nor heightened."-Sir Egerton Brydges,

Whose numbers, stealing through thy darkening vale,

May not unseemly with its stillness suit,

As, musing slow, I hail

Thy genial loved return!

For when thy folding-star, arising, shows
His paly circlet, at his warning lamp

The fragrant hours, and elves

Who slept in buds the day,

And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with sedge,

And sheds the freshening dew, and lovelier still,

The pensive pleasures sweet

Prepare thy shadowy car;

Then let me rove some wild and heathy scene,
Or find some ruin midst its dreary dells,
Whose walls more awful nod

By thy religious gleams.

Or if chill blustering winds, or driving rain,
Prevent my willing feet, be mine the hut,
That from the mountain's side,

Views wilds, and swelling floods,

And hamlets brown, and dim-discover'd spires,
And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all
Thy dewy fingers draw

The gradual dusky veil.

While Spring shall pour his showers, as oft he wont,
And bathe thy breathing tresses, meekest Eve!

While Summer loves to sport
Beneath thy lingering light:

While sallow Autumn fills thy lap with leaves,
Or Winter, yelling through the troublous air,
Affrights thy shrinking train,

And rudely rends thy robes:

So long, regardful of thy quiet rule,

Shall Fancy, Friendship, Science, smiling Peace,

Thy gentlest influence own,

And love thy favorite name!

THE PASSIONS. AN ODE FOR MUSIC.1

When Music, heavenly maid, was young,
While yet in early Grecce she sung,
The Passions oft, to hear her shell,
Throng'd around her magic cell,

1 If the music which was composed for this ode had equal merit with the ode itself, it must have been the most excellent performance of the kind in which poetry and music have, in modern times, united. Other pieces of the same nature have derived their greatest reputation from the perfection

« VorigeDoorgaan »