William Collins Quotes (19 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

William Collins: 19 quotes2 likes

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.”

William Collins

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.”

William Collins

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!”

William Collins

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

“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.”

William Collins

Source: Ode to Evening (1747) http://www.netpoets.com/classic/poems/017002.htm, line 21.

“In numbers warmly pure and sweetly strong.”

William Collins

Ode to Simplicity.

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

William Collins

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

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

William Collins

To Sir Thomas Hammer on his Edition of Shakespeare.

“Fill'd with fury, rapt, inspired.”

William Collins

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

“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.”

William Collins

Source: Dirge (1744), line 1.

“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.”

William Collins

Samuel Johnson The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1781), "William Collins" http://www.bookrags.com/ebooks/4678/50.html <br class="br">Criticism

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

William Collins

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

“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.”

William Collins

Source: Ode to Evening (1747) http://www.netpoets.com/classic/poems/017002.htm, line 9.

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

William Collins

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.”

William Collins

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

“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!”

William Collins

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.”

William Collins

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

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

William Collins

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