unrelieved by the glittering malignity and eloquent irreligion of his
later productions. Collins' callow namby-pamby died and gave no sign
of the vigorous and original genius which he afterward displayed. We
have never thought that the world lost more in the "marvellous boy,"
Chatterton, than a very ingenious imitator of obscure and antiquated
dulness. Where he becomes original (as it is called), the interest of
ingenuity ceases and he becomes stupid. Kirke White's promises were
indorsed by the respectable name of Mr. Southey, but surely with no
authority from Apollo. They have the merit of a traditional piety,
which to our mind, if uttered at all, had been less objectionable in
the retired closet of a diary, and in the sober raiment of prose.
They do not clutch hold of the memory with the drowning pertinacity of
Watts; neither have they the interest of his occasional simple, lucky
beauty. Burns having fortunately been rescued by his humble station
from the contaminating society of the "Best models," wrote well and
naturally from the first. Had he been unfortunate enough to have had
an educated taste, we should have had a series of poems from which, as
from his letters, we could sift here and there a kernel from the mass
of chaff. Coleridge's youthful efforts give no promise whatever of
that poetical genius which produced at once the wildest, tenderest,
most original and most purely imaginative poems of modem times.
Byron's "Hours of Idleness" would never find a reader except from an
intrepid and indefatigable curiosity. In Wordsworth's first preludings
there is but a dim foreboding of the creator of an era. From Southey's
early poems, a safer augury might have been drawn. They show the
patient investigator, the close student of history, and the unwearied
explorer of the beauties of predecessors, but they give no assurances
of a man who should add aught to stock of household words, or to the
rarer and more sacred delights of the fireside or the arbor. The
earliest specimens of Shelley's poetic mind already, also, give tokens