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Religious Musings, though it has had its admirers, is terribly poor stuff. The Monody on the Death of Chatterton might have been written by fifty people during the century before it. The Destiny of Nations is a feeble rant; but the Ode on the Departing Year, though still unequal, still conventional, strikes a very different note.
But high above the roar of the blazing chimney, above the din of the groaning stithy, high pealed the notes of a wild Alcaic ode, to which, chaunted by the stentorian voices of the powerful mechanics, the clanging sledges made a stormy but appropriate music. "Strike, strike the iron," thus echoed the stirring strain,
Then follows another choral ode, similar in theme to the last, dwelling on the woe brought by the act of Paris upon Troy, the change of the bridal song to the trump of war and the dirge of death; contrasting, in a profusion of splendid tropes, the beauty of Helen with the curse to which it is bound; and insisting once more on the doom that attends insolence and pride.
The date of this ode is unknown: we can only infer, from the way in which Athens is spoken of, that it was written before the war between that state and Aigina. It seems to have been sung on the winner's return home, very likely in a procession through the streets.
Collins's Ode to Simplicity was written in the stanza of Milton's Nativity, and his exquisite unrimed Ode to Evening was a study in versification, after Milton's translation of Horace's Ode to Pyrrha, in the original meters. Shakspere began to be studied more reverently: numerous critical editions of his plays were issued, and Garrick restored his pure text to the stage.
Of the country adjacent to Wynslade, Thomas Warton has given a very pleasing description in one of his sonnets, and in an "Ode sent to a friend, on his leaving a favourite village in Hampshire." Both were written on the occasion of his brother's absence, who had gone in the train of the Duke of Bolton to France.
A second later, a wretched-looking object, covered with slime and filth, emerged from the slough; this was Paganini the second! who, after securing his fiddle, that had stranded on a mud-bank, scrambled up the steep slope, amidst the roars of laughter of my people and of ourselves; while the perverse mule, having turned harmony into discord, kicked up its heels and galloped off, braying an ode in praise of liberty, as the "Lay of the last Minstrel."
The confusion was complete; the whole economy of the table disarranged the company broke up in most admired disorder and "vulgar minds will never know" anything more of Miss Simpkinson's ode till they peruse it in some forthcoming Annual.
"Fit audience find, though few." To the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early Childhood" the poet might have prefixed the lines which Dante addresses to one of his own Canzoni "Canzone, i' credo, che saranno radi Color, che tua ragione intendan bene, Tanto lor sei faticoso ed alto."
"Yes, they were different men. Listen to this." And the young man read the ode to a Sky-lark. "How joyous it is!" said Hope; "but I feel the sadness." "Yes, I often feel that in people as well as in poems," replied Arthur, looking at her closely. She colored a little said that it was warm and rose to go. The cold black eyes of Miss Fanny Newt suddenly glittered upon them.
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