SOURCE: "Collins's Evening Time," in Preromanticism, Stanford University Press, 1991, pp. 49-57.

In the excerpt below, Brown compares Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" with Collins's "Ode to Evening."

… As Gray's "Elegy" evokes the form of space, so Collins's "Ode to Evening" evokes that of time. And in the "Ode" as in the "Elegy" the evocation is not given from the start, but rather engendered through the poem's work. The "Elegy" begins with deficient modes of space—particular spaces, statuses, and stations—that that it succeeds in purging. Likewise, the "Ode" begins with deficient modes of time. Impure and unstable movement obscures the purified inner sense that the poem allows us finally to glimpse. No more than in the "Elegy" can the pure form of sensible intuition be attributed to an empirical consciousness, for it is precisely the discovery of what lies beyond empirical consciousness that is...