Lectures On The English Poets William Hazlitt

128
At fifty chides his infamous delay,
Pushes his prudent purpose to Resolve;
In all the magnanimity of thought
Resolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same.
And why? Because he thinks himself immortal.
All men think all men mortal, but themselves;
Themselves, when some alarming shock of fate
Strikes through their wounded hearts the sudden dread;
But their hearts wounded, like the wounded air,
Soon close; where past the shaft, no trace is found.
As from the wing no scar the sky retains;
The parted wave no furrow from the keel;
So dies in human hearts the thought of death.
Ev'n with the tender tear which nature sheds
O'er those we love, we drop it in their grave."
His Universal Passion is a keen and powerful satire; but the effort
takes from the effect, and oppresses attention by perpetual and violent
demands upon it. His tragedy of the Revenge is monkish and scholastic.
Zanga is a vulgar caricature of Iago. The finest lines in it are the
burst of triumph at the end, when his revenge is completed:
"Let Europe and her pallid sons go weep,
Let Afric on her hundred thrones rejoice," &c.
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