William Collins Quotes

William Collins was an English poet. Second in influence only to Thomas Gray, he was an important poet of the middle decades of the 18th century. His lyrical odes mark a turn away from the Augustan poetry of Alexander Pope's generation and towards the Romantic era which would soon follow. Wikipedia  

✵ 25. December 1721 – 12. June 1759
William Collins photo
William Collins: 19   quotes 1   like

Famous William Collins Quotes

“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.”

Source: The Passions, an Ode for Music (1747), Line 57. Compare: "Sweetest melodies / Are those that are by distance made more sweet", William Wordsworth, Personal Talk, stanza 2.

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

Source: The Passions, an Ode for Music (1747), Line 1.

“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!”

Source: Ode Occasioned by the Death of Mr. Thomson, (1748) http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/collins/thomson.php, line 1.

“In numbers warmly pure and sweetly strong.”

Ode to Simplicity.

“How sleep the brave, who sink to rest,
By all their country’s wishes blest!”

Variant: How sleep the brave who sink to rest
By all their country's wishes blest!
Source: How Sleep the Brave (1748), line 1.

William Collins Quotes

“Fill'd with fury, rapt, inspired.”

Source: The Passions, an Ode for Music (1747), Line 10.

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

Source: The Passions, an Ode for Music (1747), Line 95.

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

Oriental Eclogues. 1, Line 5. Compare: "That virtue only makes our bliss below, / And all our knowledge is ourselves to know", Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle iv, line 397.

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

Source: How Sleep the Brave (1748), line 7.

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

To Sir Thomas Hammer on his Edition of Shakespeare.

“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!”

Ode written in the year 1746. A variation of the first two lines is "By hands unseen the knell is rung; / By fairy forms their dirge is sung".

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

Source: The Passions, an Ode for Music (1747), Line 67.

“T was sad by fits, by starts 't was wild.”

Source: The Passions, an Ode for Music (1747), Line 28.

“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!”

Source: Ode Occasioned by the Death of Mr. Thomson, (1748) http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/collins/thomson.php, line 29.

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