A History of English Literature

interpretation which characterizes the great poets of three generations
later. Indeed, the attempt to write several thousand lines of pure
descriptive poetry was in itself ill-judged, since as the German critic
Lessing later pointed out, poetry is the natural medium not for description
but for narration; and Thomson himself virtually admitted this in part by
resorting to long dedications and narrative episodes to fill out his
scheme. Further, romantic as he was in spirit, he was not able to free
himself from the pseudo-classical mannerisms; every page of his poem
abounds with the old lifeless phraseology--'the finny tribes' for 'the
fishes,' 'the vapoury whiteness' for 'the snow' or 'the hard-won treasures
of the year' for 'the crops.' His blank verse, too, is comparatively
clumsy--padded with unnecessary words and the lines largely end-stopped.
WILLIAM COLLINS. There is marked progress in romantic feeling and power of
expression as we pass from Thomson to his disciple, the frail lyric poet,
William Collins. Collins, born at Chichester, was an undergraduate at
Oxford when he published 'Persian Eclogues' in rimed couplets to which the
warm feeling and free metrical treatment give much of romantic effect. In
London three years later (1746) Collins put forth his significant work in a
little volume of 'Odes.' Discouraged by lack of appreciation, always
abnormally high-strung and neurasthenic, he gradually lapsed into insanity,
and died at the age of thirty-seven. Collins' poems show most of the
romantic traits and their impetuous emotion often expresses itself in the
form of the false Pindaric ode which Cowley had introduced. His 'Ode on the
Popular Superstitions of the Highlands,' further, was one of the earliest
pieces of modern literature to return for inspiration to the store of
medieval supernaturalism, in this case to Celtic supernaturalism. But
Collins has also an exquisiteness of feeling which makes others of his
pieces perfect examples of the true classical style. The two poems in
'Horatian' ode forms, that is in regular short stanzas, the 'Ode Written in
the Year 1746' and the 'Ode to Evening' (unrimed), are particularly fine.
With all this, Collins too was not able to escape altogether from
pseudo-classicism. His subjects are often abstract--'The Passions,'
'Liberty,' and the like; his characters, too, in almost all his poems, are
merely the old abstract personifications, Fear, Fancy, Spring, and many
others; and his phraseology is often largely in the pseudo-classical
fashion. His work illustrates, therefore, in an interesting way the
conflict of poetic forces in his time and the influence of environment on a
poet's mind. The true classic instinct and the romanticism are both his
own; the pseudo-classicism belongs to the period.
THOMAS GRAY. Precisely the same conflict of impulses appears in the lyrics
of a greater though still minor poet of the same generation, a man of
perhaps still more delicate sensibilities than Collins, namely Thomas Gray.
Gray, the only survivor of many sons of a widow who provided for him by
keeping a millinery shop, was born in 1716. At Eton he became intimate with
Horace Walpole, the son of the Prime Minister, who was destined to become
an amateur leader in the Romantic Movement, and after some years at
Cambridge the two traveled together on the Continent. Lacking the money for
the large expenditure required in the study of law, Gray took up his
residence in the college buildings at Cambridge, where he lived as a
recluse, much annoyed by the noisy undergraduates. During his last three
years he held the appointment and salary of professor of modern history,
but his timidity prevented him from delivering any lectures. He died in
1771. He was primarily a scholar and perhaps the most learned man of his
time. He was familiar with the literature and history not only of the
ancient world but of all the important modern nations of western Europe,
with philosophy, the sciences of painting, architecture, botany, zoology,
gardening, entomology (he had a large collection of insects), and even