the Pindarics. All his verse is marked by dignity and distinction, by a rarely attained artistic perfection. The Bard is perhaps more dramatic and picturesque than the Progress of Poesy, which nevertheless has some of the poet's most resonant strains. Some of his most splendid lines, alongside official flatteries that seem ludicrous and commonplace, are in the Cambridge Installation Ode.

The Ode to Eton College, the Ode to Adversity, and the far-famed

Elegy show the same careful and elaborate finish; but the thought is simpler and more touching. In a letter to Beattic, Gray says: 'As to description, I have always thought that it made the most graceful or

nament of poetry, but never ought to make the sub

ject.' He practised what he taught; there is constantly some reflection arising out of the poet's descriptive passages, some solemn or touching association. Byron and others have attached, perhaps, undue value to the Elegy as the main prop of Gray's reputation. It is doubtless the most frequently read and repeated

find universal approval: on the whole, he has been approved by the public rather than by the critics. Johnson was tempted into a harsh and unjust criticism of Gray largely because the critic admired no poetry which did not contain some weighty moral truth or some chain of reasoning. And Macaulay, with good reason, said that Johnson's Gray is the worst of his Lives. The universal admiration of Pope was adverse to Gray's acceptance, yet he became increasingly popular. Beattie

of all his works, because, in Johnson's words, it 'abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.' But the loftiest type of poetry can never be very extensively popular. A simple ballad air will give pleasure to a larger number than the most triumphant display of musical genius; and poetry which deals with subjects of familiar, everyday occurrence will find more readers than the most inspired flights of imagination, however graced with such recondite allusion and suggestion as can only be enjoyed by persons of kindred taste and culture with the poet. Gray himself recognised that the popularity of the Elegy was largely due to the subject, although he ought to have known better than say that 'the public would have received it as well if it had been written in prose.' And even his best poetry did not

said at the end of the century that he was the most admired of the poets of the age; Cowper thought him the only poet since Shakespeare who could fairly be called sublime. Swinburne agrees with Johnson that Collins is greater than Gray. So

did Coleridge; so

did Mrs Browning. But it is surely by a temporary aberration of the Zeitgeist, by a too violent reaction against earlier overpraise, that recent anthologists such as Mr Henley and Mrs Meynell

wholly

omit Gray's verses, and either impli

citly or explicitly deny his claim to be a true poet. Mrs Meynell even denounces him as

glib and voluble, securing dapper and even fatuous effects, and says of the Elegy that in it 'mediocrity said its own true word.' Matthew Arnold is the chief exception-a very weighty exception-to the chorus of depreciatory recent critics. Mr Arnold (whom Professor Saintsbury has called, not very aptly, an industrious, sociable, and moderately cheerful Gray of the nineteenth century,' while Gray was an indolent, recluse, more melancholy Arnold of the eighteenth') more truly held that while Gray had almost inevitably retained much of the spirit of an age of prose (unhappily his own age)-something too much of its ratiocinations, its conceits, and its 'poetic diction'-he yet had the genuine poetic gift, the gift of insight and feeling. Collins had a full measure of the same spirit: save for Collins, Gray stood alone in his age. Mr Gosse, too, does full justice

to his artistic skill, and praises the 'originality of structure' in his odes, 'the varied music of their balanced strophes, as of majestic antiphonal choruses answering one another in some solemn temple and the extraordinary skill with which the evolution of the theme is observed and restrained.'

In Gray's character there were odd inconsistencies. He was nice, reserved, and proud-a haughty, retired scholar; yet we find him in his letters full of English idiom and English feeling, with a spice of the gossip, sometimes not over-fastidious in his allusions.

He was

indolent, yet a severe student-hating Cambridge and its college discipline, yet constantly residing there. He loved intellectual ease and luxury, and wished, as in a sort of Mohammedan paradise, to 'lie on a sofa, and read eternal new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon.' All he could say of Thomson's Castle of Indolence when it was first published was that there were some good verses in it. He had studied in the school of the ancient and Italian poets, labouring like an artist to infuse part of their spirit, their melody, and even some of their expressions, into his own English verse; while as a Latin versifier he ranks among the best of his countrymen. In his country tours the poet carried with him a convex mirror for gathering into one spot the forms and tints of the surrounding landscape. His imagination performed a like service in fixing for a moment the materials of poetry. Despite his classic taste and models, Gray was among the first to welcome and admire the Celtic or pseudo-Celtic strains of Macpherson's Ossian; and he could also delight in the stern superstitions of the Scandinavian nations; in translating from the Norse tongue the Fatal Sisters and the Descent of Odin, he revived the rude energy and abruptness of the ancient ballad minstrels. In different circumstances his genius would doubtless have soared higher and taken a wider sweep. Mr Arnold explains what is sometimes called his 'sterility' by the fact that he was born a genuine poet into the age of prose, and could never breathe its atmosphere freely. For the place of Gray and Collins in the movement of the century, see above at page 11.

The subdued humour and fancy of Gray are perpetually breaking out in his letters, with brief picturesque touches that mark the poet. In a letter to a friend, then on tour in Scotland, he playfully summed up

The Advantages of Travel.

Do not you think a man may be the wiser-I had almost said the better-for going a hundred or two of miles; and that the mind has more room in it than most people seem to think, if you will but furnish the apartments? I almost envy your last month, being in a very insipid situation myself; and desire you would not fail to send me some furniture for my Gothic apartment, which is very cold at present. It will be the easier task, as you have nothing to do but transcribe your little

red books, if they are not rubbed out; for I conclude you have not trusted everything to memory, which is ten times worse than a lead-pencil. Half a word fixed upon or near the spot is worth a cart-load of recollection. When we trust to the picture that objects draw of themselves on our mind, we deceive ourselves: without accurate and particular observation, it is but ill drawn at first, the outlines are soon blurred, the colours every day grow fainter, and at last, when we would produce it to anybody, we are forced to supply its defects with a few strokes of our own imagination.

Netley Abbey.

My health is much improved by the sea; not that I drank it or bathed in it, as the common people do : no, I only walked by it, and looked upon it. The climate is remarkably mild even in October and November; no snow has been seen to lie there for these thirty years past; the myrtles grow in the ground against the houses, and Guernsey lilies bloom in every window; the town clean and well-built, surrounded by its old stone walls, with their towers and gateways, stands at the point of a peninsula, and opens full south to an arm of the sea, which, having formed two beautiful bays on each hand of it, stretches away in direct view, till it joins the British Channel; it is skirted on either side with gently rising grounds, clothed with thick wood, and directly across its mouth rise the highlands of the Isle of Wight at some distance, but distinctly seen. In the bosom of the woods-concealed from profane eyes--lie hid the ruins of Netley Abbey; there may be richer and greater houses of religion, but the abbot is content with his situation. See there, at the top of that hanging meadow, under the shade of those old trees that bend into a half-circle about it, he is walking slowly (good man!), and bidding his beads for the souls of his benefactors, interred in that venerable pile that lies beneath him. Beyond it-the meadow still descending -nods a thicket of oaks that mask the building, and have excluded a view too garish and luxuriant for a holy eye; only on either hand they leave an opening to the blue glittering sea. Did you not observe how, as that white sail shot by and was lost, he turned and crossed himself to drive the tempter from him that had thrown that distraction in his way? I should tell you that the ferry-man who rowed me, a lusty young fellow, told me that he would not for all the world pass a night at the abbey-there were such things near it-though there was a power of money hid there! From thence I went to Salisbury, Wilton, and Stonehenge; but of these I say no more; they will be published at the university press.

P.S.-I must not close my letter without giving you one principal event of my history, which was thatin the course of my late tour-I set out one morning before five o'clock, the moon shining through a dark and misty autumnal air, and got to the sea-coast time enough to be at the sun's levee. I saw the clouds and dark vapours open gradually to right and left, rolling over one another in great smoky wreaths, and the tide -as it flowed gently in upon the sands-first whitening, then slightly tinged with gold and blue; and all at once a little line of insufferable brightness that—before I can write these five words-was grown to half an orb, and now to a whole one, too glorious to be distinctly seen. It is very odd it makes no figure on paper; yet I shall

remember it as long as the sun, or at least as long as I endure. I wonder whether anybody ever saw it before? I hardly believe it.

Grasmere.

Passed by the little chapel of Wiborn, out of which the Sunday congregation. were then issuing. Passed a beck near Dunmailrouse, and entered Westmoreland a second time; now begin to see Helmcrag, distinguished from its rugged neighbours, not so much by its height, as by the strange, broken outline of its top, like some gigantic building demolished, and the stones that composed it flung across each other in wild confusion. Just beyond it, opens one of the sweetest landscapes that art ever attempted to imitate. The bosom of the mountains spreading here into a broad basin, discovers in the midst Grasmere water; its margin is hollowed into small bays with bold eminences, some of them rocks, some of soft turf, that half conceal and vary the figure of the little lake they command. From the shore, a low promontory pushes itself far into the water, and on it stands a white village, with the parish church rising in the midst of it; hanging inclosures, corn-fields, and meadows green as an emerald with their trees, hedges, and cattle, fill up the whole space from the edge of the water. Just opposite to you is a large farmhouse, at the bottom of a steep, smooth lawn embosomed in old woods, which climb half-way up the mountain's side, and discover above them a broken line of crags, that crown the scene. Not a single red tile, no glaring gentleman's house or garden-walls, break in upon the repose of this little, unsuspected paradise; but all is peace, rusticity, and happy poverty, in its neatest and most becoming attire.

The Grande Chartreuse.

It is a fortnight since we set out hence upon a little excursion to Geneva. We took the longest road, which lies through Savoy, on purpose to see a famous monastery, called the Grande Chartreuse, and had no reason to think our time lost. After having travelled seven days very slow-for we did not change horses, it being impossible for a chaise to go post in these roads-we arrived at a little village among the mountains of Savoy, called Echelles; from thence we proceeded on horses, who are used to the way, to the mountain of the Chartreuse.

It is six miles to the top; the road runs winding up it, commonly not six feet broad; on one hand is the rock, with woods of pine-trees hanging overhead; on the other, a monstrous precipice, almost perpendicular, at the bottom of which rolls a torrent, that sometimes tumbling among the fragments of stone that have fallen from on high, and sometimes precipitating itself down vast descents with a noise like thunder, which is still made greater by the echo from the mountains on each side, concurs to form one of the most solemn, the most romantic, and the most astonishing scenes I ever beheld. Add to this the strange views made by the crags and cliffs on the other hand, the cascades that in many places throw themselves from the very summit down into the vale and the river below, and many other particulars impossible to describe, you will conclude we had no occasion to repent our pains. This place St Bruno chose to retire to, and upon its very top founded the aforesaid convent, which is the superior of the whole order. When we came there, the two fathers who are commissioned to entertain strangers-for the

rest must neither speak one to another, nor to any one else-received us very kindly, and set before us a repast of dried fish, eggs, butter, and fruits, all excellent in their kind, and extremely neat. They pressed us to spend the night there, and to stay some days with them; but this we could not do, so they led us about their house, which is, you must think, like a little city, for there are a hundred fathers, besides three hundred servants, that make their clothes, grind their corn, press their wine, and do everything among themselves. The whole is quite orderly and simple; nothing of finery; but the wonderful decency, and the strange situation, more than supply the place of it. In the evening we descended by the same way, passing through many clouds that were then forming themselves on the mountain's side.

(From a Letter to his Mother.)

In the album of the monks he wrote an Alcaic ode on the subject; and in a subsequent letter to his friend West he again adverts to this memorable visit: In our little journey up the Grande Chartreuse, I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation that there was no restraining. Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other argument. One need not have a very fantastic imagination to see spirits there at noonday. You have Death perpetually before your eyes, only so far removed as to compose the mind without frightening it.'

On turning from these fine fragments of description to Gray's poetry, one is almost moved to say that the difference lies mainly in rhyme and measure in imaginative warmth and vividness of expression the prose is well-nigh equal to the verse.

Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.
Ye distant spires, ye antique towers,
That crown the watery glade,
Where grateful Science still adores
Her Henry's holy shade;
Henry VI., founder
of the college
And ye, that from the stately brow
Of Windsor's heights the expanse below

Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey;
Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among
Wanders the hoary Thames along

His silver-winding way:

Ah, happy hills, ah, pleasing shade,
Ah, fields beloved in vain!
Where once my careless childhood strayed,
A stranger yet to pain!

I feel the gales that from ye blow
A momentary bliss bestow,

As waving fresh their gladsome wing,
My weary soul they seem to sooth [sic],
And, redolent of joy and youth,

To breathe a second spring.

Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen
Full many a sprightly race,
Disporting on thy margent green,
The paths of pleasure trace,

Who foremost now delight to cleave
With pliant arm thy glassy wave?

The captive linnet which enthral ?
What idle progeny succeed

To chase the rolling circle's speed,
Or urge the flying ball?

While some on earnest business bent

Their murmuring labours ply

'Gainst graver hours, that bring constraint To sweeten liberty;

Some bold adventurers disdain
The limits of their little reign,

And unknown regions dare descry:
Still as they run they look behind;
They hear a voice in every wind,

And snatch a fearful joy.

Gay hope is theirs, by fancy fed,
Less pleasing when possessed;
The tear forgot as soon as shed,
The sunshine of the breast.
Theirs buxom health of rosy hue,
Wild wit, invention ever new,

And lively chear of vigour born;
The thoughtless day, the easy night,
The spirits pure, the slumbers light,
That fly the approach of morn.

Alas, regardless of their doom,

The little victims play;

No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond to-day;

Yet see how all around 'em wait
The ministers of human fate,

And black Misfortune's baleful train! Ah, shew them where in ambush stand, To seize their prey, the murtherous band'; Ah, tell them they are men!

Those in the deeper vitals rage:
Lo, Poverty, to fill the band,
That numbs the soul with icy hand,
And slow-consuming Age.

To each his sufferings: all are men,
Condemned alike to groan;

The tender for another's pain,

The unfeeling for his own.

Yet, ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,

And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.

But hark! the portals sound, and pacing forth
With solemn steps and slow,

High potentates and dames of royal birth
And mitred fathers in long order go;

Great Edward, with the lilies on his brow

From haughty Gallia torn,

And sad Chatillon, on her bridal morn

That wept her bleeding love, and princely Clare, And Anjou's heroine, and the paler rose,

The rival of her crown and of her woes,

And either Henry there,

The murdered saint, and the majestic lord
That broke the keys of Rome.
(Their tears, their little triumphs o'er,
Their human passions now no more,
Save Charity, that glows beyond the tomb.)

All that on Granta's fruitful plain
Rich streams of regal bounty poured,
And bade these awful fanes and turrets rise,
To hail their Fitzroy's festal morning come;
And thus they speak in soft accord
The liquid language of the skies;
'What is grandeur, what is power?
Heavier toil, superior pain.

What the bright reward we gain?

The grateful memory of the good.

Sweet is the breath of vernal shower,

The bee's collected treasures sweet,

Sweet music's melting fall, but sweeter yet
The still small voice of gratitude.'

(From Ode for Music, on the Installation of the Duke of Grafton as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, 1769.)

King Edward III.; the Countesses of Pembroke and Clare; Queen Margaret of Anjou, and Queen Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV. ; King Henry VI. and King Henry VIII., were all founders or benefactors of colleges at Cambridge.

From 'The Progress of Poesy.'

Awake, Æolian lyre, awake,

And give to rapture all thy trembling strings.
From Helicon's harmonious springs

A thousand rills their mazy progress take:
The laughing flowers that round them blow
Drink life and fragrance as they flow.
Now the rich stream of music winds along,
Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong,

Thro' verdant vales and Ceres' golden reign:
Now rowling down the steep amain,
Headlong, impetuous, see it pour :

The rocks and nodding groves rebellow to the roar.

In climes beyond the solar road,

Where shaggy forms o'er ice-built mountains roam,
The muse has broke the twilight gloom,

To cheer the shivering native's dull abode.
And oft beneath the odorous shade
Of Chili's boundless forests laid,

She deigns to hear the savage youth repeat,

In loose numbers wildly sweet,

Their feather-cinctured chiefs and dusky loves.
Her track, where'er the goddess roves,
Glory pursue and generous shame,

The unconquerable mind and Freedom's holy flame.

Far from the sun and summer gale,

In thy green lap was Nature's darling laid,
What time, where lucid Avon strayed,
To him the mighty mother did unveil
Her awful face: the dauntless child
Stretched forth his little arms, and smiled.
'This pencil take,' she said, 'whose colours clear
Richly paint the vernal year:

Thine, too, these golden keys, immortal boy!
This can unlock the gates of Joy;

Of Horrour that, and thrilling Fears,

Or ope the sacred source of sympathetic Tears.'

Nor second he, that rode sublime

Upon the seraph-wings of Ecstasy,
The secrets of the abyss to spy.

He passed the flaming bounds of space and time :
The living throne, the sapphire-blaze,
Where angels tremble while they gaze,

He saw; but blasted with excess of light,

Closed his eyes in endless night.

Behold where Dryden's less presumptuous car
Wide o'er the fields of glory bear

Two coursers of ethereal race,

With necks in thunder cloathed, and long-resounding

pace.

The Bard-A Pindaric Ode.

This ode is founded on a tradition current in Wales, that Edward I., when he completed the conquest of that country, ordered all the bards that fell into his hands to be put to death. 'Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!

Confusion on thy banners wait, Though fanned by Conquest's crimson wing, They mock the air with idle state. Helm, nor hauberk's twisted mail, Nor e'en thy virtues, Tyrant, shall avail To save thy secret soul from nightly fears, From Cambria's curse, from Cambria's tears!' Such were the sounds, that o'er the crested pride Of the first Edward scattered wild dismay, As down the steep of Snowdon's shaggy side He wound with toilsome march his long array. Stout Glo'ster stood aghast in speechless trance: 'To arms!' cried Mortimer, and couched his quivering lance.

On a rock, whose haughty brow

Frowns o'er old Conway's foaming flood,
Robed in the sable garb of woe,

With haggard eyes the Poet stood—
Loose his beard, and hoary hair
Streamed, like a meteor, to the troubled air-
And with a master's hand, and prophet's fire,
Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre.
'Hark, how each giant oak, and desert cave,

Sighs to the torrent's awful voice beneath!
O'er thee, O King! their hundred arms they wave,
Revenge on thee in hoarser murmurs breathe;
Vocal no more, since Cambria's fatal day,
To high-born Hoel's harp, or soft Llewellyn's lay.

'Cold is Cadwallo's tongue,

That hushed the stormy main :

Brave Urien sleeps upon his craggy bed:
Mountains, ye mourn in vain
Modred, whose magic song

Made huge Plinlimmon bow his cloud-topped head.
On dreary Arvon's shore they lie,

Smeared with gore, and ghastly pale : Far, far aloof the affrighted ravens sail; The famished eagle screams, and passes by. Dear lost companions of my tuneful art,

Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes, Dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart,

Ye died amidst your dying country's cries-No more I weep. They do not sleep.

On yonder cliffs, a griesly band,

I see them sit; they linger yet,

Avengers of their native land:

With me in dreadful harmony they join,

Carnarvon