Collins. As surely as, for instance, the Ode to Duty is a work of greater perfection and more perfect greatness than that on the Intimations of Immortality, the Ode on the Passions is a work of less equal elevation and purity of excellence than, for example, is the Ode to Evening. Yet of course its grace and vigour, its vivid and pliant dexterity of touch, are worthy of all their inheritance of praise; and altogether it holds out admirably well to the happy and harmonious end; whereas the very Ode to Liberty, after an overture worthy of Milton's or of Handel's Agonistes, a prelude that peals as from beneath the triumphal hand of either of these demigods of music, steadily subsides through many noble but ever less and less noble verses, towards a final couplet showing not so much the flatness of failure as the prostration of collapse.
Living both in an age and after an age of critical poetry, Collins, always alien alike from the better and from the worse influences of his day, has shewn at least as plentiful a lack of critical instinct as ever did any poet on record, in his epistle to Hanmer on that worthy knight's 'inqualifiable' edition of Shakespeare. But his couplets, though incomparably inferior to Gray's, are generally spirited and competent as well as fluent and smooth.
The direct sincerity and purity of their positive and straightforward inspiration will always keep his poems fresh and sweet. He was a solitary song-bird among many more or less excellent pipers and pianists. He could put more spirit of colour into a single stroke, more breath of music into a single note, than could all the rest
