SOURCE: "Collins's Influence at the Turn of the Century," in Poor Collins: His Life, His Art, and His Influence, Cornell, 1937, pp. 256-68.

In the last years of the century … Collins made his first appeal to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, young and significant poets of the new romantic generation. In the works of all three poets there is definite evidence of his influence, a force which they were never to outgrow. At various times in his career Wordsworth spoke favorably of Collins. He showed considerable interest in Dyce's edition of the poet, and Dyce apparently consulted him on several points. He was particularly concerned with the Highland Ode and definitely repudiated the version in Bell's copy (the 1788 anonymous edition). He writes January 12, 1827:

You are at perfect liberty to declare that you have rejected Bell's copy in consequence of my opinion of it; and I feel much satisfaction in being the instrument of rescuing the memory of Collins from this disgrace.¹

He speaks again of the ode in a letter to Dyce, October 29, 1828,² remarking that "it was circulated through the English newspapers, in which I remember to have read it with great pleasure upon its first appearance," and noting further the source of some of the imagery, he says:

Knight has evidently misread "tree" for "bee," "Warton" for "Martin," and "Hilda" for "Kilda"; Wordsworth is referring to A Voyage to St. Kilda, with which he was familiar, for he mentions the Voyage among the Western Isles at the head of poem XXXIV in the Itinerary Poems of 1833. On three occasions he gives a favorable opinion of Collins as a poet. He says in the letter to Dyce, January 12, 1827:

These three writers, Thomson, Collins, and Dyer had more poetic imagination than any of their contemporaries unless we reckon Chatterton as of that age.

Again in his letter of October 29, 1828, he calls Collins

An author who from the melancholy circumstances of his life, particularly the latter part of it, has a peculiar claim upon such attention as you [Dyce] have bestowed upon him and his works.

In his Essay Supplementary to the Preface, 1815, he comments on Collins's neglect in his lifetime and his subsequent fame:

When Thomson died, Collins breathed forth his regrets in an Elegiac Poem, in which he pronounces a poetical curse upon him who should regard with insensibility the place where the poet's remains were deposited. The poems of the mourner himself have now passed through innumerable editions, and are universally known; but if, when Collins died, the same kind of imprecation had been pronounced by a surviving admirer, small is the number whom it would not have comprehended. The notice which his poems attained during his lifetime was so small and of course the sale so insignificant, that not long before his death he deemed it right to repay the bookseller the sum which he had advanced for them, and threw the edition into the fire.

He also commented critically on the Ode to Evening. In a letter to Dyce, May, 1830, he writes:

A word or two about Collins. You know what importance I attach to following strictly the last copy of the text of an author; and I do not blame you for printing in the Ode to Evening "brawling" spring; but surely the epithet is most unsuitable to the time, the very worst, I think, that could have been chosen.³

When Wordsworth wrote his first poetry Collins was one of the eighteenth century poets to whom he turned. Lines Written While Sailing in a Boat at Evening and Remembrance of Collins are tributes to him, both suggestive of the Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson. There are slight reminiscences of Collins in both An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. Line 235 of An Evening Walk echoes Wordsworth's favorite line from The Passions:

Yet hears her song "by distance made more sweet."

which he was later to remember in Personal Talk, II, 24-5, when he wrote:

… sweetest melodies
Are those that are by distance made more sweet.

Lines 280-1 of An Evening Walk (1820 version) recall the Ode to Evening:

Or clock that blind against the wanderer born
Drops at his feet and stills his DRONING HORN,

as do lines 291-4:

Like Una shining on her gloomy way,
The half-seen form of Twilight roams astray;
Shedding through play loop-holes mild and small,
Gleams that upon the lake's still bosom fall.⁴

Line 372 echoes the Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson:

The boat's first motion—made with DASHING OAR.

Other instances from An Evening Walk are: "EVE'S MILD HOUR invites my steps abroad," 89; "the hound, the horse's tread, and MELLOW HORN, 245; "heard by calm lakes as peeps the FOLDING STAR;" 280.

Three times in his later poetry he was to remember the poet of evening. Miscellaneous Sonnet, XXI (Part II) begins:

Hail Twilight, sovereign of one peaceful hour!

and especially in

At thy meek bidding, shadowy power!

suggests Collins. Sonnet XXXV, Gordale, begins in the manner and idiom of Collins:

At early dawn, or rather when the air
Glimmers with fading light and SHADOWY EVE
Is busiest to confer and to bereave,
Then, pensive votary, let thy feet repair
To Gordale chasm….

And in Miscellaneous Sonnets, Part II, VI, June, 1820, he pays tribute both to Thomson and to Collins:

For I have heard the quire of Richmond hill
Chanting with indefatigable bill,
Strains that recalled to mind a distant day;
When, haply under shade of that same wood,
And scarcely conscious of the dashing oars
Plied steadily between those willowy shores,
The sweet-souled poet of the Season stood—.

Collins, then, exercised a slight but definite influence on the poetry of Wordsworth who remembered him with pleasure.

Upon the young Coleridge, the poet of "tumid ode and turgid stanza," Collins cast even a stronger spell. Coleridge admits his early admiration long afterwards in the Preface to the Edition of 1832:

The poems produced before the author's twenty-fourth year, devoted as he was to the "soft strains" of Bowles, HAVE MORE IN COMMON WITH THE PASSIONATE LYRICS OF COLLINS and the picturesque wildness of the pretended Ossian, than with the well-turned sentimentality of that Muse which the overgrateful poet has represented as his earliest inspirer.

He preferred Collins to Gray⁵ and thought he had the greater genius.⁶ He found part of his pleasure in Collins's poetry because it was but generally and not perfectly understood.⁷ He was particularly impressed by the Ode on the Poetical Character, on which he twice comments. Writing to Thelwall, December 17, 1796, he confesses:

Now Collins's Ode on the Poetical Character—that part of it, I should say, beginning with "The band (as fairy legends say) Was wove on that creating day,"—has … whirled me along with greater agitations of enthusiasm than any the most impassioned scene in Schiller or Shakespeare, using the "impassioned" in its confined sense, for writing in which the human passions of pity, fear, anger, revenge, jealousy, or love are brought into view with their workings.⁸

Again he comments in the Preface to the Second Edition of the Poems:

A poem that abounds in allusions, like the "Bard" of Gray, or one that impersonates high and abstract truths, like Collins's "Ode on the Poetical Character," claims not to be popular—but should be acquitted of obscurity. The deficiency is in the Reader. But this is a charge which every poet, whose imagination is warm and rapid, must expect from his contemporaries. Milton did not escape it; and it was adduced with virulence against Gray and Collins. We now hear no more of it: not that their poems are better understood at present than they were at their first publication; but their fame is established; and a critic would accuse himself of frigidity or inattention who should profess not to understand them.

It is further suggestive that he had planned an edition of Collins and Gray; the project is twice mentioned in his Note Book.⁹

The early poems of Coleridge abound in suggestions of Collins—his diction, his personification, and his imagery. Two passages in Dura Navis recall the Ode to Fear. The picture of Vengeance, 39-40:

Whilst Vengeance drunk with human blood stands by
And smiling fires each heart and arms each hand,

and the passage, 49-55:

With trembling hands the lot I see thee draw
Which shall, or sentence thee a victim drear,
To that ghaunt Plague which savage knows no law,
Or, deep thy dagger in the friendly heart,
Whilst each strong passion agitates thy breast,
Though oft with Horror back I see thee start,
Lo! Hunger drives thee to th' inhuman heart,

have Collins's tone. The epithet "meek-eyed Peace," 59, is also from Collins, though it was first Milton's.

The Monody on the Death of Chatterton, 1790, echoes Collins in its praise of Otway, 20, "Whom Pity's self had taught to sing." Its description of "Poverty of Giant Mien," 48, recalls the Ode to Fear, and the imprecation, 86-7, is again in the manner of the Ode to Fear:

Grant me, like thee, the lyre to sound,
Like thee, with fire divine to glow.

A Wish, 1792, is an unrhymed lyric, the first stanza of which faintly suggests the Ode to Evening. Ode, April, 1792, is like Collins throughout, but the conclusion, 31-40 particularly, suggests the Ode to Mercy:

The Song of the Pixies, 1796, is peculiarly in Collins's vein. In describing the fairy-folk of Devonshire, it deals with those "airy beings" whom Collins delighted to present. Stanza V is full of echoes of the Ode to Evening:

Equally suggestive of Collins are "the parting gleam" of day on Otter's Stream, 67, and the band of "sombre hours," 76-7, attendant upon Night. The picture of the train of virtues which accompany the Faery Queen of the Pixies, 96-100, is typical of Collins's personifications:

The personification, diction, and manner of Collins are evident in a number of the other early poems to a leser degree. An Effusion at Evening, 1792, mentions the "shadowy pleasures," 7, and echoes the Ode to Evening in lines 57-8:

No more shall deck pensive pleasures sweet
With wreaths of sober hue my evening seat.

The same strain runs indefinably through Lines on an Autumnal Evening. Translation of Wrangham 's Hendecasyllabi mentions "white-robed Truth," 1, and "meek-eyed Pity," 5. Pantisocracy, 8, speaks of the "wizard passions" in Collins's phrase. The figures of "Heart-fretting Fear, with pallid look aghast" and its mingled forms of Misery, 11-18, suggest again the Ode to Fear. In two of the Sonnets on Eminent Characters there are echoes of The Passions. In To William Godwin, 7-8, Coleridge quotes directly:

Thy steady eye has shot its glances keen—
And bade th' All-lovely "scenes at distance hail."

In To Robert Southey, 6-7, he echoes lines 93-4 of the same ode:

Waked by the Song doth hope-born fancy fling
rich showers of dewy fragrance from her wing.

Lines Written at Shurton Bars, 1795, 29-30, mentions the viewless influence of "Meek Evening," and To the Author of Poems, 1795, 41, speaks of "Eve's mild gleam." The revised Monody on the Death of Chatterton mentions the "wizard passions," 147, "sober eve," 152, and "young-eyed Poesy," 154, all in Collins's characteristic idiom. To a Young Friend, 1796, 55, borrows "fancy-blest" from the Ode to Liberty. The influence of Collins is, then, abundantly evident in many of the poems between 1790 and 1796, a time at which the young Wordsworth was also turning to him.

In one significant instance Coleridge was to remember Collins after this date. The familiarity with The Passions so evident in the earlier poems was to manifest itself in the strange dream vision of Kubla Khan. The passage in Collins, 64-6:

was transmuted into:

A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!

and was remembered again in:

Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountains and the caves.¹⁰

Perhaps, too, Coleridge remembered the fragment the Bell of Arragon. The lines:

The bell of Arragon, they say,
Spontaneous speaks the fatal day,

and

Whatever dark aërial power,
Commissioned, haunts the gloomy tower,

suggest a passage in Christabel, lines 198-201:

I have heard the gray-haired friar tell
How on her death-bed she did say,
That she should hear the castle-bell
Strike twelve upon my wedding-day.

It is not surprising to find Coleridge so drawn to Collins. In their love of folk-lore, in their magic of word music, in their love of scholarship and erudite lore as well as in their indolence and indecision, they were akin. In Coleridge we may find a hint of what Collins would have been had his genius fully flowered.

Southey, too, was a devotee of Collins. Had he written nothing else his enthusiastic appreciation in the Life of Cowper would reveal his admiration:

That he [Cowper] should never before have heard of Collins, shows how little Collins had been heard of in his life-time; and that Cowper in his knowledge of contemporary literature, was now awakening, as it were, from a sleep of twenty years. In the course of those years Collins's Odes, which were utterly negected on their first appearance, had obtained their due estimation. But it should also be remembered, that in the course of one generation these poems, without any adventitious aid to bring them into notice, were acknowledged to be the best of their kind in the language. Silently and imperceptibly they had risen by their own buoyancy, and their power was felt by every reader who had any true poetic feeling.¹¹

In his General Preface, 10 May 1837, he pays another tribute to the poet:

Everyone who has an ear for metre and a heart for poetry must have felt how perfectly the metre of Collins's Ode to Evening is in accordance with the imagery and the feeling.

His own admiration for the poet led him to attempt a number of unrhymed lyrics in the stanza form of the Ode to Evening or in variations on that form. To Hymen is in the form, and stanza six suggests the diction of Collins's ode in:

Other instances are: Written on the First of January, To Recovery (in which the epithet "nymph adored" suggests Collins), the Death of Wallace, Ebb Tide, and Song of the Chikkashah Widow. To Horror is a poor and melodramatic Ode to Fear. In To Contemplation the influence of the Ode to Evening is particularly strong, especially in the lines:

It is felt again in:

Stanza 2 of Translation of a Greek Ode on Astronomy bears a striking resemblance to a passage in the Ode on the Poetical Character:

And in Vision of Judgment, Canto I, the spell of the Ode to Evening is again felt:

Derwent returning yet from eve a glassy reflection,
Where his expanded breast, then still and smooth as a mirror
Under the woods reposed …
Pensive I stood, and alone; the hour and the scene had subdued me …
Then as I stood, the bell, which awhile from its warning had rested,
Sent forth its note again, toll, toll, through the silence of evening.

Of the thirty-five thousand lines of verse which Southey estimated he had written by December, 1793, a generous share must have come from the inspiration of Collins.

Mr. Bronson¹² has said that Scott like Wordsworth found his inspiration elsewhere than in the pages of Collins. Yet Scott, too, robust in nature as he was, turned occasionally to the pages of the delicate and less fortunate poet with whom he felt a kinship. Scott's tribute to Collins in the Bride of Triermain is a commentary at once on the poet's genius and on his reputation:

For Lucy loves (like Collins, ill-starred name,
Whose lay's requital was that tardy fame,
Who bound no laurel round his living head,
Should hang it o'er his monument when dead)
For Lucy loves to tread enchanted strand,
And thread, like him, the maze of fairy land;
Of golden battlements to view the gleam,
And slumber soft by some Elysian stream.

The Ode on the Popular Superstitions naturally attracted Scott early, for here Collins had touched on a theme which Scott was to develop in the Lady of the Lake and the Lord of the Isles. In the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border Scott included three supplemental stanzas to Collins's ode by his "valued friend," William Erskine, Esq., Advocate, which had already appeared in the Edinburgh Magazine, for April, 1788, the year in which the poem was found. Scott's comment that the stanzas are "worthy of the SUBLIME ORIGINAL" shows his own feeling for the poem. His motto to Glenfinlas, or Lord Ronald's Coronach, which originally appeared in Monk Lewis's Tales of Wonder, comes from the Ode on the Popular Superstitions, 65-9; in the poem itself Moy, the prophetic seer from Columb's isle, who has the power of second-sight, suggests the influence of Collins. Lines 33-6 embroider a superstition that Collins had neglected:

Three times in the notes to the Minstrelsy Scott mentions Collins. In the Introduction to the Tale of Tamlane¹³Tamlane¹³ Scott associates lines 58-9, 62-3 of the Ode to Fear (which he quotes inaccurately and apparently from memory) with St. John's Eve, in his mind the thricehallowed eve of Collins's poem. Again in his comment on Leyden's Mermaid¹⁴ he refers to Collins's Ode to Liberty, 82, and the poet's note about the scorned mermaid who cast a mist over the Isle of Man. And in his notes on the Gray Brother, alluding to "classic Hawthornden" he quotes line 212 of the Ode on the Popular Superstitions as it appeared in the Transactions of the Royal Society copy: "The traveller now looks in vain for the leafy bower:

Where Jonson sate in Drummond's social shade."

There are also occasional suggestions in the historical romances that Scott remembered some of the other odes as well as the Ode on the Popular Superstitions. In the Lay of the Last Minstrel, I, xii, 4.

Till to her bidding she could bow
the viewless forms of air

echoes lines 65-6 of the Ode on the Popular Superstitions, a passage which Scott had already used as the motto to Glenfinlas. It is suggested again in Lady of the Lake, I, xxx:

While viewless minstrels touch the string,
'Tis thus our charmed rhymes we sing.

And in Soldier Rest Scott must have remembered Ode Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746 when he wrote:

In the Lord of the Isles his allusion to the Seer of Skye and to "Iona's piles,"

Where rest from mortal coil the Mighty of the Isles,

suggests Collins as much as Martin Martin. And twice he echoes The Passions. In Rokeby, V, xvii, Rokeby's maid prays:

Here to renew the strains she loved,
at distance heard and well approved,

—a suggestion of The Passions, 60. In the Vision of Don Roderick, LXII:

Or may I give adventurous fancy scope,
And stretch a bold hand to the awful veil
That hides futurity from anxious hope,
bidding beyond it scenes of glory hail,

echoes "AND BAD THE LOVELY SCENES AT DISTANCE HAIL," line 32 of The Passions. In the Waverley novels Scott found very little occasion to remember Collins. He did, however, twice choose a motto at the head of a chapter from Collins's verse. The heading for Chapter IV of The Monastery comes from lines 58-9 and 61-2 of the Ode to Fear, rendered inaccurately. Chapter XI of Peveril of the Peak employs line 82 of the Ode to Liberty as its motto. In the introductory epistle to the Fortunes of Nigel he quotes two lines of the Ode on the Popular Superstitions, 68-9, as part of a discussion of the phenomenon of second sight or "deuteroscopy" as Scott calls it. In all three allusions it is evident that Collins's love of folk-lore most attracted Scott.

The evidence of Collins's direct influence on Scott is slight, but it reveals that Scott was familiar with a poet who had anticipated him in celebrating the glamor and fascination of the Highlands of Scotland.

Notes

¹ Knight, Letters, II, 358.

²Ibid., III, 420.

³ Knight, II, 419. Wordsworth was indirectly responsible for Crabb Robinson's expression of opinion about Collins. From Wordsworth's criticism of "brown hamlet" in Mrs. Barbauld's Ode to Content Crabb Robinson dissents: "for evening harmonizes with content, and the brown hamlet is the evening hamlet. Collins has with exquisite beauty described the coming on of evening: 'And hamlets brown and dim discovered spires'." (Reminiscences, ed. Sadler. I, 13).

⁴ Cf. Descriptive Sketches, 115:

That glimmer hoar in eve's last light descried
Dim from the twilight water's shaggy side.

⁵Biographia Literaria, ed. Everyman, p. 10.

⁶Table Talk, April 21, 1811, ed. H. Ashe, p. 301.

⁷Anima Poetae, p. 4.

⁸Letters, ed. E. H. Coleridge, I, 196.

⁹ Folio 21a, Archiv, XCVII, 1896, p. 352; fol. 25a, p. 354. To Coleridge, too, we owe a slight bit of evidence concerning Collins's influence on the continent, a problem upon which Mr. Woodhouse has touched (TLS, 1930, p. 838). Coleridge records of Klopstock (Satyrane's Letters, Ed. Everyman, p. 301): "An Englishman had presented him with the Odes of Collins, which he had read with pleasure." Herder, however, asserted "the infinite superiority of Klopstock's Ode to all that Gray and Collins had ever written." (H. Crabb Robinson, Diary and Reminiscences, Ed. Sadler, I, 73.)

¹⁰ See on this point J. L. Lowes, the Road to Xanadu, p. 399, p. 400, and E. Blunden, TLS, 1929, p. 592. Mr. Blunden also suggests that the scenery of the Ode on the Poetical Character (probably in the antistrophe) colors that of Kubla Khan.

¹¹Bohn Lib., I, 321.

¹²Collins, p. lvii.

¹³ Ed. Crowell, p. 299.

¹⁴Op. cit., p. 651.