Born, in London, 26 Dec. 1716. Early education at Burnham. To Eton, 1727 [?]. To Pembroke Hall, Camb., as Pensioner, summer of 1734; transferred to Peterhouse, 9 Oct. 1734. Took no degree; left University, Sept. 1738. Travelled abroad with Horace Walpole, March 1739 to Sept. 1740. Returned to Peterhouse, Camb., as Fellow-Commoner, Oct. 1742; LL.B., 1743. Lived chiefly at Cambridge for remainder of life. Removed to Pembroke Coll., 6 March 1756. In London, Jan. 1759 to June 1761. Prof. of History and Mod. Languages, Cambridge, 28 July 1768. Increasing ill-health. Died, at Cambridge, 30 July 1771. Buried at Stoke Pogis. Works: “Ode on a distant prospect of Eton College” (anon.), 1747; “An Elegy wrote in a Country Churchyard” (anon.), 1751 (2nd–4th edns., same year); “Six Poems,” 1753; “The Progress of Poesy; and, The Bard,” 1758; “Poems” (collected; two independent edns.), 1768; “Ode, performed … at the installation of … A. H. Fitzroy, Duke of Grafton” (anon.), 1769. Posthumous: “A Catalogue of the Antiquities … in England and Wales” (anon.; priv. ptd.), [1773]; “Life and Letters,” ed. by W. Mason, 1774; “The Bard,” ed. by J. Martin, 1837; “Correspondence with W. Mason,” ed. by J. Mitford, 1853. Collected Works: “Poems,” ed. by W. Mason, 1775; “Poems and Letters” (priv. ptd.), 1879; “Works,” ed. by E. Gosse (4 vols.), 1884. Life: by E. Gosse, 1882.

Personal

  He is the worst company in the world. From a melancholy turn, from living reclusely, and from a little too much dignity, he never converses easily; all his words are measured and chosen, and formed into sentences; his writings are admirable; he himself is not agreeable.

  Mr. Gray, our elegant poet, and delicate Fellow-Commoner of Peter House, has just removed to Pembroke Hall, in resentment of some usage he met with at the former place. The case is much talked of, and is this:—He is much afraid of fire, and was a great sufferer in Cornhill; he has ever since kept a ladder of ropes by him, soft as the silky cords by which Romeo ascended to his Juliet, and has had an iron machine fixed to his bedroom window. The other morning Lord Percival and some Petreuchians, going a hunting, were determined to have a little sport before they set out, and thought it would be no bad diversion to make Gray bolt, as they called it, so ordered their man, Joe Draper, to roar out “fire.” A delicate white night-cap is said to have appeared at the window; but finding the mistake, retired again to the couch. The young fellows, had he descended, were determined, they said, to have whipped the Butterfly up again.

  I am sorry you did not see Mr. Gray on his return; you would have been much pleased with him. Setting aside his merit as a poet which, however, is greater in my opinion than any of his contemporaries can boast, in this or any other nation, I found him possessed of the most exact taste, the soundest judgment, and the most extensive learning. He is happy in a singular facility of expression. His composition abounds with original observations, delivered in no appearance of sententious formality, and seeming to arise spontaneously without study or premeditation. I passed two days with him at Glammis, and found him as easy in his manners, and as communicative and frank as I could have wished.

  I regret that poor Mr. Gray is now no more than Pindar. One fatal moment sets two or three thousand years aside, and brings the account equal. I really believe our British Pindar not unequal in merit to the bard of Thebes. I hope Mr. Gray has left some works yet unpublished.

  Perhaps he was the most learned man in Europe. He was equally acquainted with the elegant and profound parts of science, and that not superficially, but thoroughly. He knew every branch of history, both natural and civil; had read all the original histories of England, France, and Italy; and was a great antiquarian. Criticism, metaphysics, morals, politics, made a principal part of his study; voyages and travels of all sorts were his favourite amusements; and he had a fine taste in paintings, prints, architecture, and gardening. With such a fund of knowledge, his conversation must have been equally instructing and entertaining; but he was also a good man, a man of virtue and humanity. There is no character without some speck, some imperfection; and I think the greatest defect in his was an affectation in delicacy, or rather effeminacy, and a visible fastidiousness, or contempt and disdain of his inferiors in science.

  He was much admired for his singing in his youth; yet he was so sly in exercising this talent that Mr. Walpole tells me he never could but once prevail on him to give proof of it, and then it was with so much pain to himself that it gave him no manner of pleasure.

  What has occurred to me, from the slight inspection of his letters in which my undertaking has engaged me, is, that his mind had a large grasp; that his curiosity was unlimited, and his judgment cultivated; that he was a man likely to love much where he loved at all; but that he was fastidious and hard to please.

  Gray could never compose voluntarily: his genius resembled the armed apparition in Shakspeare’s master-tragedy. “He would not be commanded.” When he wished to compose the “Installation Ode,” for a considerable time he felt himself without the power to begin it: a friend calling on him, Gray flung open his door hastily, and in a hurried voice and tone, exclaiming in the first verse of that ode—

Hence, avaunt! ’tis holy ground!—

his friend started at the disordered appearance of the bard, whose orgasm had disturbed his very air and countenance.

  Mr. Gray was in stature rather below the middle size. He had a pleasing countenance, in which, however, there was no extraordinary expression, consequently no indication of his internal powers. The print which is prefixed to his “Life” is rather a caricature, for his features were not so stiff and prominent, but more rounded and delicate.

  His faculties were endowed with uncommon strength; he thought with a manly nervousness; and he penetrated forcibly into every subject which engaged his attention. But his petty manners were disagreeably effeminate and fastidious: his habits wanted courage and hardiness; and his temper and spirits were a prey to feebleness, indolence, and trivial derangements. His heart was pure; and his conduct, I firmly believe, stained with no crime. He loved virtue for its own sake, and felt a just and never-slackened indignation at vice. But the little irritations of his daily temper were too much affected by trifles: he loved to assume the character of the fine gentleman, a mean and odious ambition in any one, but scarcely to be forgiven in a man of genius. He would shrug his shoulders and distort his voice into fastidious tones; and take upon himself the airs of what folly is pleased to call high company.

  As the life of Gray advanced, it was still marked by the same studious and secluded habits; but he appears gradually to have left his classical studies for a more extended circle of reading, including history, antiquities, voyages, and travels; and in many of the books in his library, as Fabian’s Chronicles, Clarendon, and others, the extreme attention with which he read is seen by his various and careful annotations, and by the margins being filled with illustrations and corrections drawn from State Papers, and other original documents. The latest period of his life seems to have been very much occupied in attention to natural history in all its varied branches, both in the study of books, and in the diligent observation of nature.

  I cannot, on looking through his memoirs, letters, and poems, discover the slightest trace of passion, or one proof or even indication that he was ever under the influence of woman.

  In the even balance of all his emotions Gray preserved himself from every vice;—virtuous generally, inasmuch as he carried no one virtue into a passion. Ambition never allured, Pleasure never intoxicated, Love never engrossed him. His inspiration, as we before said, was a highly cultivated taste operating on a most harmonious ear.

  Stoke Park, thus interesting both on account of these older associations, and of Penn and Gray, is about a couple of miles from Slough. The country is flat, but its monotony is broken up by the noble character and disposition of its woods. Near the house is a fine expanse of water, across which the eye falls on fine views, particularly to the south, of Windsor Castle, Cooper’s Hill, and the Forest Woods. About three hundred yards from the north front of the house stands a column, sixty-eight feet high, bearing on the top a colossal statue of Sir Edward Coke, by Rosa. The woods of the park shut out the view of West End House, Gray’s occasional residence, but the space is open from the mansion across the park, so as to take in the view both of the church and of a monument erected by the late Mr. Penn to Gray. Alighting from the carriage at a lodge, I entered the park just at the monument. This is composed of fine freestone, and consists of a large sarcophagus, supported on a square pedestal, with inscriptions on each side. Three of them are selected from the Ode to Eton College and the Elegy…. The fourth bears this inscription:

	“This Monument, in honor of
	THOMAS GRAY,
	Was erected A.D. 1799,
	Among the scenery
	Celebrated by that great Lyric and Elegiac Poet.
	He died in 1771,
	And lies unnoted in the adjoining Church-yard,
	Under the Tomb-stone on which he piously
	And pathetically recorded the interment
	Of his Aunt and lamented Mother.”

This monument is inclosed in a neatly kept garden-like enclosure, with a winding walk approaching from the shade of the neighbouring trees. To the right, across the park at some little distance, backed by fine trees, stands the rural little church and churchyard, where Gray wrote his Elegy, and where he lies.

  Gray found very little gratification at Cambridge in the society and manners of the young university men who were his contemporaries. They ridiculed his sensitive temper and retired habits, and gave him the nickname of “Miss Gray,” for his supposed effeminacy. Nor does Gray seem to have lived on much better terms with his academic superiors. He abhorred mathematics, with the same cordiality of hatred which Pope professed towards them, and at that time concurred with Pope in thinking that the best recipe for dulness was to

	“Full in the midst of Euclid plunge at once,
	And petrify a genius to a dunce.”

  Viewed through the medium of the interest which legitimately attaches to genius, we are confident that the few incidents in the life of such a man as Thomas Gray will appear important links of a chain of existence whose value was precious beyond all calculation.

  The morose hermit of Cambridge.

  What Gray owed to his mother may be imagined. It was she who saved his life when he was a child; and it was she who sent him to Eton, where he remained six years, and to Cambridge, where he remained three or four years, and to the continent, where he traveled with Horace Walpole, living the life of a thoughtful and elegant scholar. She lived to see twelve—is it harsh to say—happy years after the death of her husband, to see her love repaid by the genius of her son. As devoted to her as she was to him, he never mentioned her without a sigh. And when she died, full of years, he placed over her loved remains this most pathetic inscription:

	Beside her Friend and Sister,
	Here sleep the Remains of
	Dorothy Gray,
	Widow; the careful, tender mother
	Of many Children, one of whom alone
	Had the Misfortune to survive her.
	She died March XI., MDCCLIII.
	Aged LXXII.

  West End, the house in which Gray’s mother lived, and he wrote much poetry and many letters, now called Stoke Court, is about one mile north of the church. Gray described it as “a compact neat box of red brick, with sash windows, a grotto made of flints, a walnut-tree with three mole-hills under it.” The house was rebuilt by Mr. Penn about 1845, on a larger scale, and is now a gentleman’s villa. The room in which Gray wrote was, however, preserved, and forms a part of the present house. The walnut-tree and grotto were retained, and the basin of gold-fishes greatly enlarged.

  In one of Phillip Gray’s fits of extravagances he seems to have had a full-length of his son painted, about this time, by the fashionable portrait-painter of the day, Jonathan Richardson the elder. The picture is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, at Cambridge. The head is good in colour and modelling; a broad, pale brow, sharp nose and chin, large eyes, and a pert expression give a lively idea of the precocious and not very healthy young gentleman of thirteen. He is dressed in a blue satin coat, lined with pale shot silk, and crosses his stockinged legs so as to display dapper slippers of russet leather. His father, however, absolutely refused to educate him, and he was sent to Eton, about 1727, under the auspices of his uncles, and at the expense of his mother.

  “Knowledge, penetration, seriousness, sentiment, humour”—so Mr. Matthew Arnold counts over the five talents committed to Gray. Five talents; yet it is not easy to think of him as ever to be a ruler of five cities. With his gathered learning, his insight and his power of organising knowledge, his judgment at once delicate and solid, his feeling for beauty in nature and in art, his amiable irony and his brightness of style, why was Gray a failure, and why does the story of his life hang weights upon our courage and our hope? One can imagine his biographer protesting in lively tones against the word “failure.” Gray created a style in English poetry; he was perhaps the most cultured Englishman of his generation; he interpreted Icelandic literature; he heralded the romantic revival; he felt the beauty of Gothic architecture; he revealed the wonders of lake and crag in Cumberland and Westmoreland; he sustained classical learning in his university; he made true friends and kept them. And, doubtless, compared with many lives, that of Gray may almost deserve to be called a success. Yet, on the other hand, there have been gallant defeats which, compared with such success as his, look like victories. After all contentions to the contrary, the settled conviction returns and maintains its hold upon our minds that Gray failed to work out the possibilities of his nature; that, for some enervating cause within, some retarding cause without, his powers must have carried him much farther than they actually did.

  His contemptuous hatred of theology and of creeds is marked; he had no patience with them; of worship he knew nothing. It has been said that he would have found a medicine for his unhappiness in wedded love; he would have found more than a medicine in religion. The stately pathos of such a life is indisputable. The pale little poet, with greatness written so largely on all his works, with keen, deep eyes, the long aquiline nose, the heavy chin, the thin compressed lips, the halting affected gait, is a figure to be contemplated with serious and loving interest, spoiled for life, as he said, by retirement.

  I was FORTUNATE enough to obtain a few years ago the original manuscript of Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”: I mention, merely for the sake of a historical record, that an American sent over to bid 200 pounds for it: I obtained it for 220. It would have been to the lasting shame of Britain to allow such a priceless treasure to cross the Atlantic. When a boy at Eton I made a pilgrimage each year to the Churchyard where Gray is entombed: no record of him exists there: he was buried in his mother’s grave: the well-intentioned, but vulgar, monument in Stoke Pogis Park, close by, is unworthy of the beauty of his consummate Art, and exquisite Refinement.

  The air of Stoke Pogis must promote longevity. The church itself is a marvel of loveliness, with its gray, ivy-clad walls, its many gables, its tall, graceful spire, and its general air of peaceful, honoured old age. Gray lies close to the western wall of the church, in the same tomb with the mother who was his idol…. We went down into the seven hundred year old church, to which we had come solely for Gray’s sake, and found, as usual, that it was a palimpsest. Always one inscription on the parchment overlies another…. In one corner a square pew is pointed out, where Gray used to sit by his mother’s side, thinking a boy’s thoughts.

  He was sensitive to all fine influences that were in the literary air. One of the greatest scholars among English poets, his taste was equal to his acquisitions. He was a sound critic of poetry, music, architecture, and painting. His mind and character both had distinction; and if there, was something a trifle finical and old-maidish about his personality—which led the young Cantabs on one occasion to take a rather brutal advantage of his nervous dread of fire—there was also that nice reserve which gave to Milton, when he was at Cambridge, the nickname of the “the lady of Christ’s.”

  Whichever way the eye turns in all the country between Windsor and Stoke Pogis there is in every place something that suggests chapters in Gray’s life or famous and beloved lines from his poems; and the landscape in which so much of his life was set and with which so many of his works are associated, is one whose whole tone and character seem peculiarly in harmony with his own genius. But it is in the quiet churchyard that the memory of the poet lives in its greatest intensity. So long as the pathos of lowly life appeals to the heart, so long as there is a soul not wholly lost to the charm of peaceful days spent in the “cool sequestered vale of life,” so long as the tender images of fading day and unavailing reminders of the dead have power to move the spirit,—so long will this God’s Acre keep green the memory of that poet whose verse abounds with “sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”

Elegy in a Country Churchyard, 1751

  As you have brought me into a little sort of distress, you must assist me, I believe, to get out of it as well as I can. Yesterday I had the misfortune of receiving a letter from certain gentlemen (as their bookseller expresses it), who have taken the Magazine of Magazines into their hands: they tell me that an ingenious Poem, called Reflections in a Country Church-Yard, has been communicated to them, which they are printing forthwith; that they are informed that the excellent author of it is I by name, and that they beg not only his indulgence, but the honour of his correspondence, &c. As I am not at all disposed to be either so indulgent, or so correspondent, as they desire, I have but one bad way left to escape the honour they would inflict upon me; and therefore am obliged to desire you would make Dodsley print it immediately (which may be done in less than a week’s time) from your copy, but without my name, in what form is most convenient for him, but on his best paper and character; he must correct the press himself, and print it without any interval between the stanzas, because the sense is in some places continued beyond them; and the title must be, “Elegy, written in a Country Church-Yard.” If he would add a line or two to say it came into his hands by accident, I should like it better. If you behold the Magazine of Magazines in the light I do, you will not refuse to give yourself this trouble on my account, which you have taken of your own accord before now. If Dodsley do not do this immediately, he may as well let it alone.

  The following Poem came into my hands by accident, if the general approbation with which this little Piece has been spread, may be called by so slight a term as accident. It is this approbation which makes it unnecessary for me to make an Apology but to the Author: as he cannot but feel some Satisfaction in having pleas’d so many Readers already, I flatter myself he will forgive my communicating that Pleasure to many more.—“THE EDITOR.”

  This is a very fine poem, but overloaded with epithet. The heroic measure, with alternate rhyme, is very properly adapted to the solemnity of the subject, as it is the slowest movement that our language admits of. The latter part of the poem is pathetic and interesting.

  The “Church-yard” abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo. The four stanzas, beginning “Yet even these bones” are to me original: I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him.

  Of smaller poems, the “Elegy” of Gray may be considered as the most exquisite and finished example in the world, of the effect resulting from the intermixture of evening scenery and pathetic reflection.

  Gray’s “Pindaric Odes” are, I believe, generally given up at present: they are stately and pedantic, a kind of methodical borrowed phrensy. But I cannot so easily give up, nor will the world be in any haste to part with, his “Elegy in a Country Church-yard;” it is one of the most classical productions that ever was penned by a refined and thoughtful mind, moralizing on human life. Mr. Coleridge (in his “Literary Life”) says that his friend Mr. Wordsworth had undertaken to show that the language of the “Elegy” is unintelligible: it has, however, been understood.

  Had Gray written nothing but his “Elegy,” high as he stands, I am not sure that he would not stand higher; it is the cornerstone of his glory; without it, his odes would be insufficient for his fame.

  I know not what there is of spell in the following simple line:

“The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep;”

but no frequency of repetition can exhaust its touching charm. This fine poem overcame even the spiteful enmity of Johnson, and forced him to acknowledge its excellence.

  There is a charm in metre, as there is in music; it is of the same kind, though the relation may be remote; and it differs less in degree, perhaps, than one who has not an ear for poetry can believe…. Gray’s “Elegy” owes much of its popularity to its strain of verse; the strain of thought alone, natural and touching as it is, would never have impressed it upon the hearts of thousands and tens of thousands, unless the diction and metre in which it was embodied had been perfectly in unison with it. Beattie ascribed its general reception to both causes…. Neither cause would have sufficed for producing so general, and extensive, and permanent an effect, unless the poem had been, in the full import of the word, harmonious.

  At its very birth, it received the stamp of immortality.

  Gray’s “Elegy” will be read as long as any work of Shakespeare, despite of its moping owl and the tin-kettle of an epitaph tied to its tail. It is the first poem that ever touched my heart, and it strikes it now just in the same place. Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, the four giants who lived before our last Deluge of poetry, have left the ivy growing on the church-yard wall.

  The work is a masterpiece of poetical handling…. But the poem, in spite of all his skill, has somewhat of an artificial and hot-bed air; the imagery, beautiful as it is, inspires the reader with an involuntary feeling of its having been painfully collected from a multitude of sources. It is a piece of rich mosaic; and though the parts of which it is composed are exquisite in themselves and dovetailed together with no ordinary art, the effect of the whole is rather of construction than evolution.

  For wealth of condensed thought and imagery, fused into one equable stream of golden song by intense fire of genius, the Editor knows no poem superior to this “Elegy,”—none quite equal. Nor has the difficulty of speaking well on common topics, without exaggeration yet with unfailing freshness and originality, been ever met with greater success. Line after line has the perfection of a flawless jewel: it is hard to find a word that could have been spared, or changed for the better. This condensation, however, has injured the clearness of the poem: the specific gravity of the gem, if we may pursue the image, has diminished its translucent qualities. Many notes have hence been added;—the useful but prosaic task of paraphrase is best left to the reader, who may make one for his benefit, and then burn it for his pleasure.

  Of all short poems—or indeed of all poems whatsoever—in the English language, which has been, for a century and a quarter past, the one most universally, persistently, and incessantly reproduced and quoted from? I suppose, beyond rivalry and almost beyond comparison, the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” of Thomas Gray. Such is the glory which has waited upon scant productiveness and relative mediocrity—though undoubtedly nobly balanced and admirably grown and finished mediocrity—in the poetic art. The flute has overpowered the organ, the riding-horse has outstripped Pegasus, and the crescent moon has eclipsed the sun.

  A popularity due in great measure to the subject,—created for Gray a reputation to which he has really no right. He himself was not deceived by the favour shown to the “Elegy.” “Gray told me with a good deal of acrimony,” writes Dr. Gregory, “that the ‘Elegy’ owed its popularity entirely to the subject, and that the public would have received it as well if it had been written in prose.” This is too much to say; the “Elegy” is a beautiful poem, and in admiring it the public showed a true feeling for poetry. But it is true that the “Elegy” owed much of its success to its subject, and that it has received a too unmeasured and unbounded praise. Gray himself, however, maintained that the “Elegy” was not his best work in poetry, and he was right. High as is the praise due to the “Elegy,” it is yet true that in other productions of Gray he exhibits poetical qualities even higher than those exhibited in the “Elegy.” He deserves, therefore, his extremely high reputation as a poet, although his critics and the public may not always have praised him with perfect judgment. We are brought back, then, to the question: How, in a poet so really considerable, are we to explain his scantiness of production?

  Extreme elegance and careful composition are more conspicuous in the “Elegy” than in most other English poems of equal length. The art is not forced upon the reader’s attention, but it has doubtless preserved a poem in which it is commonly said that there is no other quality of exceptional greatness. Yet there is a sort of ungraciousness in that remark, inasmuch as it resembles the well-known criticism of the man who, when he first saw Hamlet acted, commented on the large number of familiar quotations that it contained, for the “Elegy” is so well known that it seems thereby somewhat trite and valueless.

  It was whilst Gray was quietly vegetating in Bloomsbury that an event occurred of which he was quite unconscious, which yet has singularly endeared him to the memory of Englishmen. On the evening of the 12th of September, 1759—whilst Gray, sauntering back from the British Museum to his lodgings, noted that the weather was cloudy, with a south-southwest wind—on the other side of the Atlantic the English forces lay along the river Montmorency, and looked anxiously across at Quebec and at the fateful heights of Abraham. When night-fall came, and before the gallant four thousand obeyed the word of command to steal across the river, General Wolfe, the young officer of thirty-three, who was next day to win death and immortality in victory, crept along in a boat from post to post to see that all was ready for the expedition. It was a fine, silent evening, and as they pulled along with muffled oars, the General recited to one of his officers who sat with him in the stern of the boat nearly the whole of Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” adding as he concluded, “I would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French to-morrow.” Perhaps no finer compliment was ever paid by the man of action to the man of imagination, and, sanctified, as it were, by the dying lips of the great English hero, the poem seems to be raised far above its intrinsic rank in literature, and to demand our respect as one of the acknowledged glories of our race and language.

  Gray’s Elegy is better known and more widely loved than any single poem in our language…. It is because the original charm is still as fresh as ever, that we may call the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” the central poem of the age.

  Its melancholy music gets somehow stamped on the brain of nearly all of us, and lends a poetic halo to every old graveyard that has the shadow of a church-tower slanted over it.

  Gray’s famous “Elegy,” 1751, which was originally sold for sixpence, jumped from £36 in 1888 to £59 in 1892, and when the next copy came into the market in December 1893 it sold for £74.

  It is the habit of anthologists to include the “Elegy” in collections of Lyric poetry, but no definition of a lyric poem that I have ever heard of can be so strained as to bring this long and almost perfect elegiac poem into such a collection as the present.

  The fame of Thomas Gray is unique among English poets, in that, although world-wide and luminous, it springs from a single poem, a flawless masterpiece,—“The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” This is the one production by which he is known to the great mass of readers and will continue to be known to coming generations; yet in his own time his other poems were important factors, in establishing the high repute accorded to him then and still maintained in the esteem of critics…. Lowell says of the “Elegy” that it won its popularity “not through any originality of thought, but far more through originality of sound.” There must, however, be some deeper reason than this for the grasp which it has upon the minds and hearts of all classes.

  There is no poem in the English language more decidedly popular. It appeals to a feeling all but universal,—applicable to all ranks and classes of society. The poem exhibits the highest poetic sensibility and the most cultivated taste. No poem in the English language is more figurative, nor is there any of greater metrical beauty. The popularity which it first attained, today continues unabated.

  The “Elegy” is the masterpiece of this whole “Il Penseroso” school, and has summed up for all English readers, for all time, the poetry of the tomb.

Odes

  Even my friends tell me they [the Odes] do not succeed, and write me moving topics of consolation on that head; in short, I have heard of nobody but a player [Garrick] and a doctor of divinity [Warburton] that profess their esteem for them.

  He speaks to a people not easily impressed with new ideas, extremely tenacious of the old; with difficulty warmed, and as slowly cooling again. How unsuited then to our national character is that species of poetry which rises upon us with unexpected flights! Where we must hastily catch the thought, or it flies from us; and, in short, where the Reader must largely partake of the Poet’s enthusiasm in order to taste his beauties.

  Talking of Gray’s “Odes,” he said, “They are forced plants raised in a hotbed; and they are poor plants; they are but cucumbers after all.” A gentleman present, who had been running down Ode-writing in general, as a bad species of poetry, unluckily said, “Had they been literally cucumbers, they had been better things than Odes.”—“Yes, Sir (said Johnson), for a hog.”

  I yet reflect with pain upon the cool reception which those noble odes, “The Progress of Poetry” and “The Bard,” met with at their first publication; it appeared that there were not twenty people in England who liked them.

  No piece can now be selected from his works that can justly come into competition with the “Bard” of Gray; over his inimitable ode a tinge so wildly, awful, so gloomily terrific, is thrown, as without any exception to place it at the head of lyric poetry.

  Gray (to whom nothing is wanting to render him, perhaps, the finest poet in the English language but to have written a little more) is said to have been so much hurt by a foolish and impertinent parody of two of his finest odes, that he never afterwards attempted any considerable work.

  “The Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” is more mechanical and commonplace [than the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”]; but it touches on certain strings about the heart, that vibrate in unison with it to our latest breath. No one ever passes by Windsor’s “stately heights,” or sees the distant spires of Eton College below, without thinking of Gray. He deserves that we should think of him; for he thought of others, and turned a trembling, ever-watchful ear to the “still sad music of humanity.”

  … I have this evening been reading a few passages in Gray’s Odes. I am very much pleased with them. The “Progress of Poesy” and the “Ode on Eton College” are admirable. And many passages of “The Bard,” though, I confess, quite obscure to me, seem to partake in a great degree of the sublime. Obscurity is the great objection which many urge against Gray. They do not consider that it contributes in the highest degree to sublimity; and he certainly aimed at sublimity in these Odes. Every one admires his Elegy, and if they do not his Odes, they must attribute it to their own want of taste.

  That beautiful stanza where he has made the founders of Cambridge to pass before our eyes like shadows over a magic glass.

  Who has not felt the sentiments and the regrets expressed here with all the sweetness of the Muse? Who has not been affected at the remembrances of the sports, the studies, the loves, of his early years! But can we recall them to life? The pleasures of youth reproduced by memory are ruins viewed by torch-light.

  Overflies [“The Bard”] all other English lyrics like an eagle…. It was the prevailing blast of Gray’s trumpet that more than anything else called men back to the legitimate standard.

  Gray’s Odes have a stately swing to their measures, which comes nearer to Pindar than any other poetry. He is the most successful copyist of the Greek metres, and he never fails to stir us by the mere power of style.

  Compared, not with the work of the great masters of the golden ages of poetry, but with the poetry of his own contemporaries in general, Gray’s may be said to have reached, in his style, the excellence at which he aimed; while the evolution, also, of such a piece as his “Progress of Poesy,” must be accounted not less noble and sound than its style.

  In the “Eton College,” again, the change from emotion to emotion, the balance of the parts, the pathetic humor of the conclusion, which recalls and binds together and suffuses the whole, must strike everybody who reflects for a moment on the construction of the poem. The effect of the whole, and of each part as contributing to the whole, has been elaborately calculated, elaborately, and yet with such vividness of emotional insight that there is no trace of labor. Stanza follows stanza as if by spontaneous growth, and the concluding reflection arises as if by irresistible suggestion.

Letters

  I find more people like the grave letters than those of humour, and some think the latter a little affected, which is as wrong a judgment as they could make; for Gray never wrote anything easily but things of humour. Humour was his natural and original turn—and though, from his childhood, he was grave and reserved his genius led him to see things ludicrously and satirically; and though his health and dissatisfaction gave him low spirits, his melancholy turn was much more affected than his pleasantry in writing. You knew him enough to know I am in the right.

  Read Gray’s Letters on his Tour to the Lakes. He saw little, and that little hastily; but what he did see he sketched with the pen inimitably. The touches with which he occasionally gives life and spirit to the delineation are exquisite. Yet in Gray’s prose, as in his verse, there is some thing affected; and his wit, though very refined and pure, has the air of being forced. The description of the sunrise is incomparably fine.

  Gray’s letters very much resemble what his conversation was. He had none of the airs of either a scholar or a poet; and though on those and all other subjects he spoke to me with the utmost freedom, and without any reserve, he was in general company much more silent than one could have wished.

  His letters are inimitably fine. If his poems are sometimes finical and pedantic, his prose is quite free from affectation. He pours his thoughts out upon paper as they arise in his mind; and they arise in his mind without pretence, or constraint, from the pure impulse of learned leisure and contemplative indolence. He is not here on stilts or in buckram; but smiles in his easy-chair as he moralizes through the loopholes of his retreat on the bustle and raree-show of the world, or “those reverend bedlams—colleges and schools!”—He had nothing to do but to read and think, and to tell his friends what he read and thought. His life was a luxurious, thoughtful dream.

  Delightful indeed are these “Letters:” evincing the taste of a virtuoso, the attainments of a scholar, and the gaiety of a classical wit.

  Gray appears to us to be the best letter-writer in the language. Others equal him in particular qualities, and surpass him in amount of entertainment; but none are so nearly faultless. Chesterfield wants heart, and even his boasted “delicacy;” Bolingbroke and Pope want simplicity; Cowper is more lively than strong; Shenstone reminds you of too many rainy days, Swift of too many things he affected to despise, Gibbon too much of the formalist and the litteratéur. The most amusing of all our letter-writers are Walpole and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; but though they have abundance of wit, sense, and animal spirits, you are not always sure of their veracity. Now, “the first quality in a companion,” as Sir William Temple observes, “is truth;” and Gray’s truth is as manifest as his other good qualities. He has sincerity, modesty, manliness (in spite of a somewhat effeminate body), learning, good-nature, playfulness, a perfect style; and if an air of pensiveness breathes all over, it is only of that resigned and contemplative sort which completes our sympathy with the writer…. Gray is the “melancholy Jaques” of English literature, without the sullenness or causticity.

  Everyone knows the letters of Gray, and remembers the lucid simplicity and directness, mingled with the fastidious sentiment of a scholar, of his description of such scenes as the Chartreuse. That is a well-known description, but those in his journal of a “Tour in the North” have been neglected, and they are especially interesting since they go over much of the country in which Wordsworth dwelt, and of which he wrote. They are also the first conscious effort—and in this he is a worthy forerunner of Wordsworth—to describe natural scenery with the writer’s eye upon the scene described, and to describe it in simple and direct phrase, in distinction to the fine writing that was then practised. And Gray did this intentionally in the light prose journal he kept, and threw by for a time the refined carefulness and the insistence on human emotion which he thought necessary in poetic description of Nature. In his prose then, though not in his poetry, we have Nature loved for her own sake.

  Kindly feeling, an indolent turn, intellectual fastidiousness, are traceable up and down the course of the correspondence, and present a genuine likeness of the man.

  However people may differ in their estimate of Gray as a poet, as a man he is secure of our affection, so soon as we get to know him, and any one may know him who will read his letters. Here, surely, there is no want of speaking out. Indeed, there are few literary men of so attractive a nature as Gray. Perhaps he is the most lovable of all except Charles Lamb, and with Lamb, despite many obvious differences, he has many points in common. They were both solitary creatures, living a recluse life in the world, but not of it, their best friends among the dead; they were both exquisite critics and no mean writers of poetry; they were both a prey to melancholy or rather, as Gray says, to “leucocholy;” they had both a delicate and delightful humour; they were both the very soul of gentle goodness. And so it comes about that their letters, in which they live to us, are among the few external good things which are necessary to happiness. The charm of a letter of Gray’s lies partly in this interest of his character, and partly in the perfect felicity with which everything is said.

  His letters are all but the best in the best age of letter-writing. They are fascinating not only for the tender and affectionate nature shown through a mask of reserve, but for gleams of the genuine humour which Walpole pronounced to be his most natural vein.

General

	“What muse like Gray’s shall pleasing, pensive, flow,
	Attempered sweetly to the rustic woe;
	Or who like him shall sweep the Theban lyre,
	And, as his master, pour forth thoughts of fire?”

  The author of the finest odes, and of the finest moral elegy in the world.

  I have been reading Gray’s Works, and think him the only poet since Shakspeare entitled to the character of sublime. Perhaps you will remember that I once had a different opinion of him. I was prejudiced. He did not belong to our Thursday society, and was an Eton man, which lowered him prodigiously in our esteem. I once thought Swift’s letters the best that could be written; but I like Gray’s better. His humour, or his wit, or whatever it is to be called, is never ill-natured or offensive, and yet, I think equally poignant with the Dean’s.

	Not that her blooms are mark’d with beauty’s hue,
	My rustic Muse her votive chaplet brings;
	Unseen, unheard, O Gray, to thee she sings!—
	While slowly-pacing thro’ the churchyard dew,
	At curfeu-time, beneath the dark-green yew,
	Thy pensive genius strikes the moral strings;
	Or borne sublime on Inspiration’s wings,
	Hears Cambria’s bards devote the dreadful clue
	Of Edward’s race, with murthers foul defil’d;
	Can aught my pipe to reach thine ear essay?
	No, bard divine! For many a care beguil’d
	By the sweet magic of thy soothing lay,
	For many a raptur’d thought, and vision wild,
	To thee this strain of gratitude I pay.

  As a writer he had his peculiarity, that he did not write his pieces first rudely and then correct them, but laboured every line as it arose in the train of composition; and he had a notion, not very peculiar, that he could not write but at certain times, or at happy moments; a fantastic foppery, to which my kindness for a man of learning and of virtues wishes him to have been superior…. To say that he has no beauties, would be unjust: a man like him, of great learning and great industry, could not but produce something valuable. When he pleases least, it can only be said that a good design was ill directed.

  It is no incurious subject to enquire, what is the spirit of lyric poetry?… The Greeks, the Greeks alone, my friend, are the masters, and their works the models of this kind of poetry. If we examine these models with care, we shall perceive that this species of poetry divides itself, in resemblance of the works of nature, into two kinds, the sublime, and the beautiful. In the first class Pindar stood without a rival till Gray appeared.

	Or pour, with Gray, the moving flow
	Warm on the heart.

  When the taste has been almost exclusively cultivated, the character will be without energy, and its most prominent feature will be that delicacy of feeling against which Mr. Hume has entered so just a protest. Gray stripped of his genius is a tolerably fair model of a man of mere taste, and nothing can be well imagined less desirable than Gray’s sickly constitution of mind. Nothing, I think, affords a more lively representation of intellect, thus puny and passive, than those masses of animated jelly which one sees at times scattered along the seashore without bone or tendon, that quiver to every blast and shrink at every touch.

  The most costive of poets.

  Of all English poets he was the most finished artist. He attained the highest degree of splendour of which poetical style seems to be capable. If Virgil and his scholar Racine may be allowed to have united somewhat more ease with their elegance, no other poet approaches Gray in this kind of excellence. The degree of poetical invention diffused over such a style, the balance of taste and of fancy necessary to produce it, and the art with which an offensive boldness of imagery is polished away, are not indeed always perceptible to the common reader, nor do they convey to any mind the same species of gratification which is felt from the perusal of those poems which seem to be the unpremeditated effusions of enthusiasm; but to the eye of the critic, and more especially to the artist, they afford a new kind of pleasure, not incompatible with a distinct perception of the art employed, and somewhat similar to the grand emotions excited by the reflection on the skill and toil exerted in the construction of a magnificent palace. They can only be classed among the secondary pleasures of poetry, but they never can exist without a great degree of its higher excellences.

  He was indeed the inventor, it may be strictly said so, of a new lyrical metre in his own tongue. The peculiar formation of his strophe, antistrophe, and epode, was unknown before him; and it could only have been planned and perfected by a master genius, who was equally skilled by long and repeated study, and by transfusion into his own mind of the lyric composition of ancient Greek and of the higher “canzoni” of the Tuscan poets, “di maggior carme e suono,” as it is termed in the commanding energy of their language. Antecedent to “The Progress of Poetry,” and to “The Bard,” no such lyrics had appeared. There is not an ode in the English language which is constructed like these two compositions; with such power, such majesty, and such sweetness, with such proportioned pauses and just cadences, with such regulated measures of the verse, with such master principles of lyric art displayed and exemplified, and, at the same time, with such a concealment of the difficulty, which is lost in the softness and uninterrupted flowing of the lines of each stanza, with such a musical magic, that every verse in it in succession dwells on the ear and harmonizes with that which is gone before.

  That Mr. Gray, who never permitted any of his compositions to appear even to his friends before they were finished with the most elaborate exactness—who did not even trust himself with a sketch of his projected works, but wrought them line by line to the highest degree of perfection, till even his own industry was fatigued with the task—that a critic so fastidious should have committed to his executors a vast mass of indigested memoranda never intended for publication by himself, vel cremanda vel in publicum emittenda, more especially when his will was written in a state of perfect recollection, must be regarded as one of the anomalies of the human mind for which it is vain to seek any solution but in the general inconsistency of our nature.

  Gray failed as a poet not because he took too much pains and so extinguished his animation, but because he had very little of that fiery quality to begin with, and his pains were of the wrong sort. He wrote English verses as his brother Eton school boys wrote Latin, filching a phrase now from one author and now from another. I do not profess to be a person of very various reading; nevertheless, if I were to pluck out of Gray’s tail all of the feathers which I know belong to other birds, he would be left very bare indeed. Do not let anybody persuade you that any quantity of good verses can be produced by mere felicity; or that an immortal style can be the growth of mere genius. “Multa tulit fecit que” must be the motto of all those who are to last.

  Gray, with the talents, rather of a critic than a poet—with learning, fastidiousness, and scrupulous delicacy of taste, instead of fire, tenderness, or invention—began and ended a small school, which we could scarcely have wished to become permanent, admirable in many respects as some of its productions are—being far too elaborate and artificial either for grace or for fluency, and fitter to excite the admiration of scholars, than the delight of ordinary men. However, they had the merit of not being in any degree French, and of restoring to our poetry the dignity of seriousness, and the tone at least of force and energy.

  The obscurity so often objected to in him is certainly a defect not to be justified by the authority of Pindar, more than anything else that is intrinsically objectionable. But it has been exaggerated. He is nowhere so obscure as not to be intelligible by recurring to the passages. And it may be further observed, that Gray’s lyrical obscurity never arises, as in some writers, from undefined ideas or paradoxical sentiments. On the contrary, his moral spirit is as explicit as it is majestic; and deeply read as he was in Plato, he is never metaphysically perplexed. The fault of his meaning is to be latent, not indefinite or confused. When we give his beauties re-perusal and attention, they kindle and multiply to the view. The thread of association that conducts to his remote allusions, or that connects his abrupt transitions, ceases then to be invisible. His lyrical pieces are like paintings on glass, which must be placed in a strong light to give out the perfect radiance of their colouring.

  No wonder he should describe so well what he saw, for he seems to be present at life rather as a spectator than an actor. When he wrote, it was more to exercise his mind, or entertain his fancy, than from any ambition to please or be admired by others. England had not sent abroad so elegant a scholar since the days of Milton; but he did not, like Milton, seek for distinction in the company of the learned. Whatever was going forward, he was anxious to observe, but cared not how little he was himself seen. The few incidents in his life are to be collected from his letters, which were written with no view to publication, and on that account show to more advantage the excellence of his character, his duty and affection as a son, his cordiality and sincerity as a friend, his diligence, accuracy and elegance as a scholar, and the high sense of probity and honour that actuated his whole conduct.

  When we read Gray we are led into the ideal world: every thing is new to us, and novelty is always a source of admiration…. He writes nothing dictated by his feelings, or by his heart. He appeals to the understanding and the imagination alone. Even in his celebrated elegy he expresses only those sentiments which naturally occur to a philosophic mind in contemplating the final destiny of beings whose existence is limited to a contracted span. Whatever incidental remarks arise from this contemplation in his “Elegy,” have no reference to the heart, or its affections. He looked only to the intellectual part of our nature, for he wrote not what his feelings, but what his understanding dictated.

  Talking of epitaphs, L. Smith said that Mackintosh thinks that of Gray on his mother the most perfect in the language.

  The Lyrical crown of Gray was swept away at one fell swoop by the ruthless arm of Dr. Johnson. That the Doctor’s celebrated critique was unduly severe must be admitted; but the stern censor had truth on his side, nevertheless. There is more of Art than Nature in Gray; more of recollection than invention; more of acquirement than genius. If I may use a colloquial illustration, I should say, that the marks of the tools are too evident on all that he does.

  A laborious mosaic, through the hard stiff lineaments of which little life or true grace could be expected to look; real feeling, and all freedom in expressing it, are sacrificed to pomp, cold splendour; for vigour we have a certain mouthing vehemence, too elegant indeed to be tumid, yet essentially foreign to the heart, and seen to extend no deeper than the mere voice and gestures. Were it not for his “Letters,” which are full of warm exuberant power, we might almost doubt whether Gray was a man of genius; nay, was a living man at all, and not rather some thousand-times more cunningly devised poetical turning-loom, than that of Swift’s Philosophers in Laputa.

  Gray is one of the few, the very few, of our greatest poets, who deserves to be studied in every line for the apprehension of that wonderful sweetness, power, and splendour of versification which has made him (scholastic and difficult as he is) one of the most popular of writers, though his rhymes are occasionally flat, and his phrases heathen Greek to ordinary readers. The secret of his supremacy consists principally in the consummate art with which his diction is elaborated into the most melodious concatenation of syllables to form lines.

  I think there is something very majestic in Gray’s “Installation Ode;” but as to the “Bard” and the rest of his lyrics, I must say I think them frigid and artificial.

  There is no doubt that Gray laboured some of his compositions too much, and that this often rendered him abrupt and obscure, and the train of his ideas interrupted, so that the reader cannot follow them without great pains, and without the aid of notes. This is an essential fault in poetry, and absolutely destroys eloquence, which, if it cannot carry the reader or hearer simultaneously along with it, fails in its purpose.

  Gray, as the inmate of a hall at Cambridge, as one seldom absent from the schools, might well have been forgiven for adhering implicitly to the common models. Yet his strain of the Welsh Bard, and his snatches from the Runic, show with how bold a flight he could soar into the open sky. It is needless to praise where there are none to disapprove. It is striking, however, to observe the beauty of that stanza which he expunged from his “Elegy on a Country Churchyard;” so that it might almost be said, that even the leavings of Gray are superior to the finished compositions of other men. Again, when we reflect how frequent the invasion of the Roman Empire by the Barbaric tribes has engaged the pen of other writers from Jornandes down to Gibbon, it is worthy of note that so much eloquence and imagery should remain to be compressed by this poet within the narrow compass of four lines.

  Gray was ambitious to be thought gentleman-like; he could not bear to hear any one talk of his poetry, of which he was ashamed. He prided himself on being deeply versed in history, and so he really was; he turned his attention also to the natural sciences, and had pretensions to chemistry; as Sir Humphrey Davy lately aspired, but with reason, to poetical renown. Where are the gentle manlikeness, the history, and the chemistry of Gray? He lives only in a melancholy smile of those Muses whom he despised.

  Painfully and minutely laborious, dffident of his own powers, weighing words in a balance, borrowing a thought here, and a phrase there, Gray wrote English as he wrote Latin. It was a dead language to him, in which he sought to acquire an elegant proficiency by using only the epithets and the phrases rendered orthodox by the best models. But he was no vulgar plagiarist—his very deficiency of invention became productive of a beauty peculiarly his own, and created a kind of poetry of association; so that in reading Gray we are ever haunted with a delightful and vague reminiscence of the objects of a former admiration or love, as early things and thoughts that are recalled to us by some exquisite air of music, and in some place most congenial to dreamlike recollections of grace and beauty…. In these contributions, levied from all lands, the excellence of Gray is felicitously displayed. That excellence was an admirable delicacy of taste; the ear of his mind was exquisitely attuned; all the notes he borrows he connects into perfect concord with each other;—and thought and rhyme are equally harmonious. His poems are like cabinets of curious and costly gems—the gems have been polished often by hands long mouldered into dust, and have glittered in the coronals of many a foreign muse, but it is for the first time that they have been so artfully disposed in one collection,—so well selected, so skillfully displayed.

  In Gray, surely, we have lost a literary historian such as the world has not yet had; so rare is that genius who happily combines qualities apparently incompatible. In his superior learning, his subtle taste, his deeper thought, and his more vigorous sense, we should have found the elements of a more philosophical criticism, with a more searching and comprehensive intellect, than can be awarded to our old favorite, Thomas Warton.

	GRAY, while Windsor’s antique towers shall stand,
	Or spring revisit Britain’s favour’d land;
	While those old bards whose praise he sung so well
	Shall keep their place in memory’s haunted cell;
	When the green churchyard and the halow’d tower
	Attract your steps at eve’s soft, solemn hour;
	As long as men can read, and boys recite,
	As long as critics sneer, and bards endite,
	And lavish lords shall print their jingling staff,
	Mid ample margin, leaving verge enough;
	So long shall Gray, and all he said and sung,
	Tang the shrill accents of the school-girl’s tongue;
	So long his Ode, his Elegy, and Bard,
	By lisping prodigies be drawl’d and Marr’d.

  His powers of humour are proved, not so much by “the Long Story” as by the two admirable political pasquinades, which are very puritanically excluded from the common collections of his poems. That on Lord Sandwich and the Cambridge University election which begins—

“When sly Jemmy Twitcher;”

is the very raciest and tartest piece of the kind in our language. Gray’s translations from the Norse and Welsh are universally popular. The “Descent of Odin” is generally one of the first pieces of English poetry, which a clever child voluntarily learns by heart, nor is it less a favourite with grown up critics. It is worth while to compare a portion of it with the original Norse. We see thus what Gray’s taste led him to adopt, and what to modify. It also shows his skill and genius in adding, when desirable, to the archaic simplicity of the original.

  Johnson’s life of Gray is a disparaging performance, the work of a superior mind anxious to cavil and find fault; its depreciatory tone has, however, been far from catching, and Gray has had ample justice done him in the general admiration of the world.

  How much do I not owe to Gray, and how I love him.

  What sort of literatesque types are fit to be described in the sort of literature called poetry is a matter on which much might be written. Mr. Arnold, some years since, put forth a theory that the art of poetry could only delineate great actions. But though, rightly interpreted and understood,—using the word “action” so as to include high and sound activity in contemplation,—this definition may suit the highest poetry, it certainly cannot be stretched to include many inferior sorts and even many good sorts. Nobody in their senses would describe Gray’s “Elegy” as the delineation of a “great action:” some kinds of mental contemplation may be energetic enough to deserve this name, but Gray would have been frightened at the very word. He loved scholar-like calm and quiet inaction; his very greatness depended on his not acting, on his “wise passiveness,” on his indulging the grave idleness which so well appreciates so much of human life.

  In spite of the dulness of contemporary ears, preoccupied with the continuous hum of the popular hurdy-gurdy, it was the prevailing blast of Gray’s trumpet that more than anything else called men back to the legitimate standard.

  Wordsworth has laid hold of a sonnet of Gray’s as a text to preach against false poetic diction. And yet Gray, notwithstanding his often too elaborate diction, deserves better of lovers of English poetry than to have his single sonnet thus gibbeted, merely because, instead of saying the sun rises, it makes

“Reddening Phœbus lift his golden fire.”

In the ode on Spring, it is “the rosy-bosomed hours, fair Venus’ train,” which bring spring in. Venus is thrust between you and the advent of spring, much as Adversity is made “the daughter of Jove.” For the nightingale we have “the Attic warbler,” as in another ode, for the yellow corn-fields we have “Ceres’ golden reign.” It is needless to say how abhorrent this sort of stuff is to the modern feeling about Nature. And yet, notwithstanding these blemishes. Gray did help forward the movement to a more perfect and adequate style, in which Nature should come direct to the heart, through a perfectly transparent medium of art. When he is at his best, as in the Elegy, Nature and human feeling so perfectly combine that the mind finds in all the images satisfaction and relief. There is in the Elegy no image from Greece or Rome, no intrusive heathen deity, to jar upon the feeling. From the common English landscape alone is drawn all that is needed to minister to the quiet but deep pathos of the whole.

  I always think that there is more Genius in most of the three volume Novels than in Gray: but by the most exquisite Taste, and indefatigable lubrication, he made of his own few thoughts, and many of other men’s, a something which we all love to keep ever about us. I do not think his scarcity of work was from Design: he had but a little to say, I believe, and took his time to say it.

  Gray, a born poet, fell upon an age of prose. He fell upon an age whose task was such as to call forth in general men’s powers of understanding, wit and cleverness, rather than their deepest powers of mind and soul…. Gray, with the qualities of mind and soul of a genuine poet, was isolated in his century. Maintaining and fortifying them by lofty studies, he yet could not fully educe and enjoy them; the want of a genial atmosphere, the failures of sympathy in his contemporaries, were too great…. A sort of spiritual east wind was at that time blowing; neither Butler nor Gray could flower. They never spoke out. Gray’s poetry was not only stinted in quality by reason of the age wherein he lived, it suffered somewhat in quality also.

  In 1768 he was appointed Professor of History there, an office for which he was well qualified, but he never discharged the duties of his situation, being too lazy to prepare a course of lectures. Gray was a literary voluptuary, refined, finical, indisposed to active exertions, and so terrified lest a faulty piece of work should go out of his hands that he wrote very little. He was an extensive and curious reader in all departments of literature, and prevented time from lying heavy on his hands by engaging in all those trifling occupations by which so many worthy indolent people try to persuade themselves that they are busy. He made annotations in the books which he read; he drew up (for his own edification) tables of chronology; during the chief part of his life he kept a daily record of the blowing of flowers, the leafing of trees, the state of the thermometer, the quarter from which the wind blew, the falling of rain, and other matters of the kind.

  Of Gray he said, “Gray in his limited sphere is great, and has a wonderful ear.”

  In one point only did Gray excel Emerson,—in the art of versification; which is a lower gift than either poetic insight or poetic expression, in both which Emerson greatly excelled Gray.

  I would desire you not to forget the changes of what I may call the manners of Cambridge, since Gray’s time; the approximations of social and domestic life, especially in relation to female society, which would, I believe, not only have softened the asperity of his judgments respecting you, but might have even so far cheered his stagnant spirits, and diverted the monotony of his lonely hours, as to have relieved me from the main difficulty I have to encounter in assigning to Thomas Gray his prime and proper place in English literature. This is, in simple phrase, the scantiness—in adverse criticism, the sterility—of his genius. This peculiarity need not affect our sense of the greatness or even of the wonder at the apparition which it even augments, but undoubtedly it changes the aspect of our judgment just as in our estimate of greatness in life we have a different standard for the hero of one magnanimous action whatever it may be, and of the man of a continuous heroic life. For this prominent problem of the genius of Gray every serious critic will attempt his own solution.

  You will rather ask me how the individuality of Gray may strike an artist in its relation to Art; well, I answer this: It is an individuality in which an artist finds something to forgive, but how much to love and to admire! and that wherein we dissent from him lay in his time, but in that which we love and admire he was a precursor and a prophet. If, after the manner of his day, he bowed in painting to Guido, in architecture his chastened taste rebelled against the tawdry antics of Horace Walpole’s Gothic. But it is chiefly in relation to landscape that the modern feeling stirred in him. Nature knew in him a lover, and in her turn loved to unseal to him her inmost secrets. Her beauties for him revealed a new and richer meaning, for him a fuller charm breathed from the meadow and from the mere, and the mountains lost their antique terrors, and their gloom, fired by a new light, turned in his eyes to glory; a new dawn had arisen. Salvator Rosa and his kind were dead. His path was clear for Turner, for Constable, for Crome. It was well, sir, that artists should join in doing homage to a man who amongst the foremost heralded the day in which such men were given to our country.

  The bulk exhibited by his poetry may not seem imposing to the critic, but it does not frighten the reader. It is natural for us to wish that a writer of Gray’s order of genius should have produced some one large work; not because size is essential to greatness, but because it is necessary to the display of invention on a grand scale, and to the development of passions and activities working through mighty agencies. Yet it is extremely doubtful if his fame would have been enhanced in the slightest measure if he had accomplished what is so natural for us to desire. He probably knew the limits of his own powers better than his friends or critics. The unpublished fragments which he left do not, on the whole, make us regret very deeply that he never completed long and ambitious works. They would certainly have contained many fine lines, and might have contained many fine passages; but the spread of his reputation would most probably have been hindered rather than helped by the weight it had to carry.

  Elegance, sweetness, pathos, or even majesty he could achieve, but never that force which vibrates in every verse of larger-moulded men. Bonstetten tells us that “every sensation in Gray was passionate,” but I very much doubt whether he was capable of that sustained passion of the mind which is fed by a prevailing imagination acting on the consciousness of great powers. That was something he could never feel, though he knew what it meant by observation of others, and longed to feel it. In him imagination was passive; it could divine and select, but not create. Bonstetten, after seeing the best society in Europe on equal terms, also tells us that Gray was the most finished gentleman he had ever seen. Is it over fine to see something ominous in that word finished? It seems to imply limitations; to imply a consciousness that sees everything between it and the goal rather than the goal itself, that undermines enthusiasm through the haunting doubt of being undermined. We cannot help feeling in the poetry of Gray that it too is finished, perhaps I should rather say limited, as the greatest things never are, as it is one of their merits that they never can be. They suggest more than they bestow, and enlarge our apprehension beyond their own boundaries. Gray shuts us in his own contentment like a cathedral close or college quadrangle. He is all the more interesting, perhaps, that he was a true child of his century, in which decorum was religion. He could not, as Dryden calls it in his generous way, give his soul a loose, although he would. He is of the eagle brood, but unfledged. His eye shares the æther which shall never be cloven by his wing. But it is one of the school-boy blunders in criticism to deny one kind of perfection because it is not another. Gray, more than any of our poets, has shown what a depth of sentiment, how much pleasurable emotion mere words are capable of stirring through the magic of association, and of artful arrangement in conjunction with agreeable and familiar images.

  Gray and Collins, distinct enough in character to the careful critical inspector, have to the outward eye a curious similarity. They were contemporaries; they wrote very little, and that mostly in the form of odes; they both affected personation and allegorical address to a very unusual extent; both studied effects which were Greek in their precision and delicacy; both were learned and exact students of periods of literature now reinstated in critical authority, but in their day neglected. Yet, while Gray was the greater intellectual figure of the two, the more significant as a man and a writer, Collins possessed something more thrilling, more spontaneous, as a purely lyrical poet. When they are closely examined, their supposed similarity fades away; and, without depreciating either, we discover that each was typical of a class—that Collins was the type of the poet who sings, as the birds do, because he must; and Gray of the artist in verse, who has learned everything which the most consummate attention to workmanship can teach him, when added to the native faculty of a singularly delicate ear…. The most important poetical figure in our literature between Pope and Wordsworth.

  I will admit that, although Gray is the author of what is perhaps the most imposing single short poem in the language, and although he has charm, skill, and distinction to a marvellous degree, his originality, his force of production, were so rigidly limited that he may scarcely be admitted to the first rank.

  It is scarcely a paradox to say that he has left much that is incomplete, but nothing that is unfinished. His handwriting represents his mind; I have seen and transcribed many and many a page of it, but I do not recollect to have noticed a single carelessly written word, or even letter. The mere sight of it suggests refinement, order, and infinite pains. A mind searching in so many directions, sensitive to so many influences, yet seeking in the first place its own satisfaction in a manner uniformly careful and artistic, is almost foredoomed to give very little to the world; it must be content, as the excellent Matthias says, to be “its own exceeding great reward.” But what is given is a little gold instead of much silver; a legal tender at any time, though it has never been soiled in the market. He claims our honour as one of those few who in any age have lived in the pursuit of the absolute best, and who help us to mistrust the glib facility with which we are apt to characterize epochs. In all that he has left, there is independence, sincerity, thoroughness; the highest exemplar of the critical spirit; a type of how good work of any kind should be done.

  The smallness of his actual achievements is sufficiently explained by his ill-health, his extreme fastidiousness, his want of energy and personal ambition, and the depressing influences of the small circle of dons in which he lived. The unfortunate eighteenth century has been blamed for his barrenness; but probably he would have found any century uncongenial. The most learned of all our poets, he was naturally an eclectic. He almost worshipped Dryden, and loved Racine as heartily as Shakespeare. He valued polish and symmetry as highly as the school of Pope, and shared their taste for didactic reflection and for pompous personification. Yet he also shared the tastes which found expression in the romanticism of the following period. Mr. Gosse has pointed out with great force his appreciation of Gothic architecture, of mountain scenery, and of old Gaelic and Scandinavian poetry. His unproductiveness left the propagation of such tastes to men much inferior in intellect, but less timid in utterance, such as Walpole and the Wartons. He succeeded only in secreting a few poems which have more solid bullion in proportion to the alloy than almost any in the language, which are admired by critics, while the one in which he has condescended to utter himself with least reserve and the greatest simplicity, had been pronounced by the vox populi to be the most perfect in the language.

  Why, then, with so many favorable conditions did Gray produce so little? The chief condition was unfavorable; the spirit of the age was alien to his genius. He was a poet of great gifts and defective impulse fallen upon a prosaic time. The atmosphere he breathed, instead of vitalizing, debilitated him. Nobly endowed, and richly furnished with knowledge, he lacked motivity, and the age was against him.

  Although Gray’s biographers and critics have very seldom spoken of it, the most interesting thing in a study of his poetry—and the thing, of course, that exclusively concerns us here—is his steady progress in the direction of Romanticism. Beginning as a classicist and disciple of Dryden, he ended in thorough-going Romanticism. His early poems contain nothing Romantic; his “Elegy” has something of the Romantic mood, but shows many conventional touches; in the Pindaric Odes the Romantic feeling asserts itself boldly; and he ends in enthusiastic study of Norse and Celtic poetry and mythology. Such a steady growth in the mind of the greatest poet of the time shows not only what he learned from the age, but what he taught it. Gray is a much more important factor in the Romantic movement than seems to be commonly supposed. This will appear from a brief examination of his poetry.

  Yet both in his poetry and, what now more closely concerns us, in his prose, he exhibits the art of concealing his art. We feel ourselves in the presence of a most finished artist, but we do not see him mixing his colours, or fingering his brushes. We enjoy the effect without having thrust upon our notice the process or processes by which it has been produced. In his Letters the habit of a refined and polished manner has become second nature. He writes like a scholar, but without stiffness or effort. He is classical, but never pedantic. In addition to all the culture that so eminently distinguished Gray, he possessed natural gifts without which all his culture would have done little to endear him to the general reader. He had a genuine vein of humour, which not only prevents his being dull, but makes him at times highly entertaining. He had a keen sense of the beauty of landscape, and one of his greatest pleasures was to gaze upon it and to describe it. He was Wordsworthian before Wordsworth was born. Lastly, though reserved and seemingly dry and cynical, he was a man of the tenderest affections. He does not wear his heart upon his sleeve; but it would be a gross mistake to conclude because he does not wear it, that he had none to wear.

  Gray was not so well known as the others. The only one of his poems to be read in France was the “Elegy written in a country churchyard,” which was translated by the “Gazette littéraire” in 1765, and was freely copied by French poets, from Lemierre to Marie-Joseph Chénier, and from Fantanes or Delille to Chateaubriand. The “Elegy” is quite the most popular of Gray’s works, but it by no means represents the profound and unique originality of the author of “The Bard” and the “Descent of Odin,” than whom few poets have been more sincere. Nevertheless, this work, so modern in the sentiments it expresses yet at the same time so subtly classical in taste, attained something like celebrity in France. Gray’s studious and highly cultivated talent provided, as it were, a connecting link between new aspirations and the classical methods to which Frenchmen were accustomed; he was spoken of as a “sublime philosopher, and a child of harmony.”… By virtue of the sincerity of his religious feelings, of the delicious vagueness of his impressions, and of his serene and lofty inspiration, Gray is beyond dispute the predecessor of Chateaubriand and Lamartine, and of Rousseau before them. “With him,” says his translator, the author of “René,” “begins that school of the melancholy poets, which in our day has been transformed into a school of poets of despair.” A valuable testimony, considering the authority with which it comes.

  Every boy who leaves Eton creditably is presented with a copy of the works of Gray, for which everything has been done that the art of printers, bookbinders and photographers can devise. This is one of the most curious instances of the triumphs of genius, for there is hardly a single figure in the gallery of Etonians who is so little characteristic of Eton as Gray. His only poetical utterance about his school is one which is hopelessly alien to the spirit of the place, though the feelings expressed in it are an exquisite summary of those sensations of pathetic interest which any rational man feels at the sight of a great school. And yet, though the attitude of the teacher of youth is professedly and rightly rather that of encouragement than of warning, though he points to the brighter hopes of life rather than brandishes the horrors that infest it, yet the last word that Eton says to her sons is spoken in the language of one to whom elegy was a habitual and deliberate tone.

  Despite the beauty and skill of his natural painting in the Odes, Gray never describes Nature for her own sake. It is always with some moral, some human feeling in view.

  By far the most important example of the clogs and crosses of the time is to be found in Thomas Gray, a man of less original poetical inspiration than Collins, perhaps not much more gifted in this way even than Shenstone, but a far better and far wider scholar than either, and entirely free from all untoward circumstance. Neither Milton, nor Wordsworth, nor Tennyson had greater facility for developing whatsoever poetical gifts were in each than had Gray.