WILLIAM COLLINS

ODE TO EVENING

IF aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song,
May hope, chaste eve, to soothe thy modest ear,
Like thy own solemn springs,

Thy springs, and dying gales,

50 nymph reserved, while now the bright-haired sun Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts,

With brede ethereal wove,

O'erhang his wavy bed:

Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat 10 With short, shrill shriek, flits by on leathern wing; Or where the beetle winds

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His small but sullen horn,

As oft he rises 'midst the twilight path,

Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum:

Now teach me, maid composed,

To breathe some softened strain,

Whose numbers, stealing through thy darkening vale, May, not unseemly, with its stillness suit,

As, musing slow, I hail

Thy genial loved return!

For when thy folding star arising shows
His paly circlet, at his warning lamp

The fragrant hours, and elves

Who slept in flowers the day,

And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with

sedge,

And sheds the freshening dew, and, lovelier still,
The pensive pleasures sweet

Prepare thy shadowy car.

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Then lead, calm votaress, where some sheety lake

Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallowed pile,
Or upland fallows grey

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Reflect its last cool gleam.

But when chill blustering winds, or driving rain,
Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut,

That from the mountain's side,

Views wilds, and swelling floods,

And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires;
And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all
Thy dewy fingers draw

The gradual dusky veil.

While spring shall pour his showers, as oft he wont,

And bathe thy breathing tresses, meekest eve!

While summer loves to sport
Beneath thy lingering light;

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45 While sallow autumn fills thy lap with leaves; Or winter, yelling through the troublous air, Affrights thy shrinking train,

And rudely rends thy robes:

So long, sure-found beneath the sylvan shed, 50 Shall fancy, friendship, science, rose-lipped health, Thy gentlest influence own, And hymn thy favourite name!

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ΤΟ

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ODE TO FEAR

THOU, to whom the world unknown,
With all its shadowy shapes, is shown;
Who seest, appalled, the unreal scene,
While fancy lifts the veil between :

Ah fear! ah frantic fear!

I see, I see thee near.

I know thy hurried step, thy haggard eye!
Like thee I start; like thee disordered fly.
For lo, what monsters in thy train appear!
Danger, whose limbs of giant mould
What mortal eye can fixed behold?

Who stalks his round, an hideous form,
Howling amidst the midnight storm;
Or throws him on the ridgy steep

Of some loose hanging rock to sleep:

And with him thousand phantoms joined,

Who prompt to deeds accursed the mind:
And those, the fiends, who near allied,
O'er nature's wounds, and wrecks, preside;
Whilst vengeance, in the lurid air,
Lifts her red arm, exposed and bare:
On whom that ravening brood of fate,
Who lap the blood of sorrow, wait:
Who, fear, this ghastly train can see,
And not look madly wild, like thee?

EPODE

In earliest Greece, to thee, with partial choice,
The grief-full muse addrest her infant tongue;
The maids and matrons, on her awful voice,

Silent and pale, in wild amazement hung.

Yet he, the bard who first invoked thy name,
Disdained in Marathon its power to feel:

For not alone he nursed the poet's flame,

But reached from virtue's hand the patriot's steel.

But who is he whom later garlands grace,

Who left awhile o'er Hybla's dews to rove,

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With trembling eyes thy dreary steps to trace,

Where thou and furies shared the baleful grove?

Wrapt in thy cloudy veil, the incestuous queen

Sighed the last call her son and husband heard,

4 When once alone it broke the silent scene, And he, the wretch of Thebes, no more appeared.

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O fear, I know thee by my throbbing heart:
Thy withering power inspired each mournful line:
Though gentle pity claim her mingled part,

Yet all the thunders of the scene are thine!

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ANTISTROPHE

Thou who such weary lengths hast past,
Where wilt thou rest, mad nymph, at last?
Say, wilt thou shroud in haunted cell,
Where gloomy rape and murder dwell?
Or, in some hollowed seat,

'Gainst which the big waves beat,

Hear drowning scamen's cries, in tempests brought? Dark power, with shuddering meek submitted thought, Be mine to read the visions old

55 Which thy awakening bards have told:

And, lest thou meet my blasted view,
Hold each strange tale devoutly true;
Ne'er be I found, by thee o'erawed,
In that thrice hallowed eve abroad,
60 When ghosts, as cottage maids believe,
Their pebbled beds permitted leave;
And goblins haunt, from fire, or fen,
Or mine, or flood, the walks of men!