The Curfer colls the Kwall of pasting Day.
The truth was homeward plod, his weary Way.
other
Herd wand" slonely car the Lea:
and leaves the world to Darkness & to me
Now fades the glimmon ring

Landscape

on

"the Sight,

And all the Air a solemn Stillness holds.
Save where the Beetle wheels his droning Flight,
Or drowsy Sinkleings bull the discant Notes.
Save that from yonder the Moon complain
of susping

The

wand

mantled Sower

Molest her wandering near her secret
Molest her ancient solitary Reign;
Beneath those rugged Elona,
where heaves the Turf

Each

his

Elms, that

in many

Call for

narrow Call

a.

Bower

Yewtree's Shade, mouldiring Heap,

ever land.

The rude Forefathers of the Hamlet sleep. The breezy Call of incense breathing Morn The Swallow invitt ring from the straty-built shed, The Cock's shrill Clarion, & the ecchoing Horn! renarion, rouve them from their lowly Bed. more the blazing Hearth shall burn. or busy Huswife ply her Luening their live's Return.

oft did the Harvest to their Sickles
Their Furrow oft the stubborn Glebe has broke,
Flow jocund did they drive their Scam a field!
Flow bowed the Woods beneath their

Stroke:

sturdy
Let not Ambition mock their useful Foil,
Their homely Jays, & Destiny obscure;
For Grandeur hear with a disdainful Smiele
The short & simple Annals of the Poor.
The Beast of Heratory, the Pomp of Power,
And all that Beauty, all that Wealth e'er gave
Awaits alike th'incircable Hour.

to These no

The Paths of Glory lead but to the Grave
Forgive, ye Ormed, th' involuntary Fault,
If Memory.
Trophies Fraise,
where thro' the Ling dresim Ile & fretted Vault
The pealing Anther swells the Note of Praise.
Can storied ton or animated Bust

Back to it's Mansion call the fleeting Breath:
Can Harour's Voice provoke the sillout Dust,
Or Slachty soothen the dull cats Ear of Deach,

VOL. III.

Page of MS. of Gray's "Elegy"

*

T

FROM "THE PROGRESS OF POESY."

In climes beyond the solar road,

Where shaggy forms o'er ice-built mountains roam

The Muse has broke the twilight gloom

To cheer the shivering natives' dull abode.

And oft, beneath the odorous shade

Of Chili's boundless forests laid,

She deigns to hear the savage youth repeat,

In loose numbers wildly sweet,

Their feather-cinctured chiefs, and dusky loves

Her track, where'er the goddess roves,

Glory pursue, and generous Shame,

The unconquerable Mind, and Freedom's holy flame.

Woods, that wave o'er Delphi's steep,
Isles, that crown th' Egean deep,

Fields, that cool Ilissus laves,

Or where Mæander's amber waves
In lingering labyrinths creep,

How do your tuneful echoes languish,
Mute, but to the voice of anguish !
Where each old poetic mountain
Inspiration breathed around;
Every shade and hallowed fountain
Murmured deep a solemn sound:
Till the sad Nile, in Greece's evil hour,

Left their Parnassus for the Latian plains.
Alike they scorn the pomp of tyrant Power,

And coward Vice, that revels in her chains.

When Latium had her lofty spirit lost,

They sought, oh Albion ! next thy sea-encircled coast.

William Collins (1721-1759) was the son of a prosperous hatter in Chichester, where he was born on Christmas Day 1721. According to an early tradition, he attended the Prebendal School in Chichester. In 1733 he was sent to Winchester, as a scholar on the foundation, and remained there seven years. There was a great deal of poetical enthusiasm in the school during this period, and Collins began to write verses at twelve. His Persian Eclogues are said by Warton to have been written when Collins was seventeen, that is to say, in 1738; they appeared anonymously in 1742. But meanwhile, and before the boy left Winchester,

some of his verses had been printed in the Gentleman's Magazine. Collins was head of the school in 1740, and, after matriculating at Queen's College, Oxford, went to Magdalen College as a demy in 1741. At the University he was "distinguished for genius and indolence"; he is understood to have left Oxford, rather abruptly, early in 1744. He went over to Flanders to be a soldier, but was told that he was "too indolent even for the army." He returned to London, and intended to enter upon holy orders, but was dissuaded from doing so by a wealthy tobacconist. It is plain that he was not fitted to devote himself to the labour involved by the adoption of any profession. He sold his property in Sussex, and "subsisted on the proceeds" in the leading coffee-houses. of London until all his little fortune was dissipated. Dr. Johnson, who now made his acquaintance and liked him, said that "Collins had many projects in his head." None of them came to anything, and it is probable that the poet's irresolution was already the consequence of mental disease. His Odes, a slender volume containing the most splendid of his productions, appeared in the winter of 1746-47. It was not bought, and Collins, in a fit of anger, burned the

remaining copies. After the death of Thomson, Collins published, in June 1748, a singularly beautiful monody on that event. In 1749, after having wasted all his substance, and tasted the bitterness of poverty, Collins inherited from an uncle a sum of money "which," as Johnson says, "he could hardly think exhaustible, and which he did not live to exhaust." He withdrew to Chichester, where he wrote, in 1750, his Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands, which was posthumously printed in 1788. He also wrote an Ode on the Music of the Grecian Theatre, which has unhappily been lost. He now settled down to write a History of the Revival of Learning, but the malady which had long threatened him now definitely attacked him. Terrified by the overshadowing of his intellect, Collins closed his books and tried to forget his anxieties by travelling in France. Nothing, however, stayed the progress of

the disease. His symptoms were originally those, not so much of madness, as of "general laxity and feebleness," but during a visit to Oxford in 1754 the malady took a gloomier character. For the next five years he lingered at Chichester, under the care of his sister, hopelessly insane, but with glimmerings of sanity, since in 1756 he corrected his early eclogues for republication in the following year. Towards the last, however, his condition became terrible, and he filled the cloisters of the cathedral with his shrieks and moanings. He died at Chichester on the 12th of June 1759. Gilbert White, who knew him at college, says that Collins was "of a light and clear complexion, with grey eyes, so very weak at times as hardly to bear a candle in the room." According to Johnson, "his morals were pure and his opinions pious." A few friends were much attached to him; but it is evident from all tradition that the beautiful light of the genius of Collins burned within a very feeble and inefficient physical framework.