William Collins

"In numbers warmly pure and sweetly strong."

"Well may your hearts believe the truths I tell: 'T is virtue makes the bliss, where'er we dwell."

"How sleep the brave who sink to rest By all their country's wishes blest!"

"By fairy hands their knell is rung; By forms unseen their dirge is sung; There Honour comes, a pilgrim gray, To bless the turf that wraps their clay; And Freedom shall awhile repair, To dwell a weeping hermit there!"

"Too nicely Jonson knew the critic's part; Nature in him was almost lost in Art."

"To fair Fidele's grassy tomb Soft maids and village hinds shall bring Each opening sweet of earliest bloom, And rifle all the breathing spring."

"Each lonely scene shall thee restore; For thee the tear be duly shed; Beloved till life can charm no more, And mourn'd till Pity’s self be dead."

"Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat, With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds His small but sullen horn, As oft he rises 'midst the twilight path, Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum."

"For when thy folding-star arising shows His paly circlet, at his warning lamp The fragrant hours, and elves Who slept in buds the day, And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with sedge And sheds the fresh'ning dew, and lovelier still, The pensive pleasures sweet Prepare thy shadowy car."

"When Music, heavenly maid, was young, While yet in early Greece she sung."

"Fill'd with fury, rapt, inspired."

"'T was sad by fits, by starts 't was wild."

"With eyes up-raised, as one inspired, Pale Melancholy sate retired, And from her wild sequestered seat, In notes by distance made more sweet, Poured thro' the mellow horn her pensive soul."

"Love of peace, and lonely musing, In hollow murmurs died away."

"O Music! sphere-descended maid, Friend of Pleasure, Wisdom's aid!"

"By fairy hands their knell is rung, By forms unseen their dirge is sung."

"In yonder Grave a Druid lies Where slowly winds the Stealing Wave! The Year's best Sweets shall duteous rise To deck its Poet's sylvan Grave!"

"But thou, lorn stream, whose sullen tide No sedge-crown'd sister now attend, Now waft me from the green hill's side Whose cold turf hides the buried friend!"

"He had employed his mind chiefly on works of fiction, and subjects of fancy; and, by indulging some peculiar habits of thought, was eminently delighted with those flights of imagination which pass the bounds of nature, and to which the mind is reconciled only by a passive acquiescence in popular traditions. He loved fairies, genii, giants, and monsters; he delighted to rove through the meanders of enchantment, to gaze on the magnificence of golden palaces, to repose by the waterfalls of Elysian gardens."