^i lifts MfflwfflH? ■ H^H ■ ■ ■Ml ^ Brk nHHHwHiil Class Jp K 5 got Book JkA. Copyright N° COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT: J^**/- h^vtrL-U-U^ (ft rxs- frfry SELECT POEMS OF THOMAS GRAY, Edited, with Notes, BY WILLIAM J. ROLFE, Litt.D., FORMERLY HEAD MASTER OF THE HIGH SCHOOL, CAMBRIDGE, MASS. WITH ENGRAVINGS. * » i •» r *> -> > n a a o REVISED EDITION. NEW YORK •:• CINCINNATI •:• CHICAGO AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY iw# copies rceceivea FEB 17 1904 VCopyrigM Entry r ENGLISH CLASSICS. Edited by WM. J. ROLFE, Litt. D. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, 56 cents per volume. Shakespeare's Works. The Merchant of Venice. Richard III. Othello. Henry VIII. Julius Caesar. King Lear. A Midsummer-Night's Dream. The Taming of the Shrew. Macbeth. ' All 's Well that Ends Well. Hamlet. Coriolanus. Much Ado about Nothing. The Comedy of Errors. Romeo and Juliet. Cymbeline. As You Like It. Antony and Cleopatra. The Tempest. Measure for Measure. Twelfth Night. The- Winter's Tale. Merry Wives of Windsor. Love's Labour 's Lost. King John. Two Gentlemen of Verona. Richard II. Timon of Athens. Henry IV. Part I. Troilus and Cressida. Henry IV. Part II. Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Henry V. The Two Noble Kinsmen. Henry VI. Part I. Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, etc Henry VI. Part II. Sonnets. Henry VI. Part III. Titus Andronicus. GOLD^MTH«S SELBCtf £o€MS.«J Br©\?N1JCG'$ SELECT POEMS. G^ay^SeJ^eVt ^P$e/^» ! I Br©wni*s-g'« Select Dramas. ^kNGR ?9EM9 ©F •JoVRS' MfL*I«ON. Mj&AULAy's LAYS OF ANCIENT ROME. Wordsworth's Select Poems. .** e^-L'trgB^^T^TJE^ fIom^Aa^espeVr^s* Comedies. a " •* LA3bS*£E£LB«»£'hoV ^H^A^ESPEARE'| e TRAGEDIES. fc Edited* by WM. J. ROLFE, "litt. D. Illustrated. Cloth, 12mo, 50 cents per volume. Copyright, 1876, by Harper & Brothers. Copyright, 1904, by William J. Rolfe. Gray's Poems. W. P. 2 EXTRACTS FROM PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION. Many editions of Gray have been published in the last fifty years, some of them very elegant, and some showing considerable editorial labor, but not one, so far as I am aware, critically exact either in text or in notes. No editor since Mathias (a.d. 1814) has given the 2d line of the Elegy as Gray wrote and printed it ; while Mathias's mispunctuation of the 123d line has been copied by his successors, almost without ex- ception. Other variations from the early editions are mentioned in the notes. It is a curious fact that the most accurate edition of Gray's collected poems is the editio princeps of 1768, printed under his own supervision. The first edition of the two Pindaric odes, The Progress of Poesy and The Bard (Strawberry-Hill, 1757), was printed with equal care, and the proofs were probably read by the poet. The text of the present edition has been collated, line by line, with that of these early editions, and in no instance have I adopted a later reading. All the MS. variations, and the various readings I have noted in the modern editions, are given in the notes. Pickering's edition of 1835, edited by Mitford, has been followed blindly in nearly all the more recent editions, and its many errors (see pp. 84 and 105, foot-notes) have been faithfully reproduced. Even its blunders in the " indenting" of the lines in the corresponding stanzas of the two Pindaric odes, which any careful proof-reader ought to have corrected, have been copied again and again — as in the Boston (1853) reprint of Pickering, the pretty little edition of Bickers & Son (London, n. d.), the fac-simile of the latter printed at our University Press, Cambridge (1866), etc. Of former editions of Gray, the only one very fully annotated is Mit- ford's (Pickering, 1835), already mentioned. I have drawn freely from that, correcting many errors, and also from Wakefield's and Mason's editions, and from Hales's notes {Longer English Poems, London, 1872) on the Elegy and the Pindaric odes. To all this material many original notes and illustrations have been added. I have retained most of the "parallel passages" from the poets given by the editors, and have added others, without regard to the critics who vi PREFACE. have sneered at this kind of annotations. Whether Gray borrowed from the others, or the others from him, matters little ; very likely, in most in- stances, neither party was consciously the borrower. Gray, in his own notes, has acknowledged certain debts to other poets, and probably these were all that he was aware of. Some of these he contracted unwittingly (see what he says of one of them in a letter to Walpole, quoted in the note on the Ode on the Spring, 31), and the same may have been true of some apparently similar cases pointed out by modern editors. To me, however, the chief interest of these coincidences and resemblances of thought or expression is as studies in the " comparative anatomy " of poetry. The teacher will find them useful as pegs to hang questions upon, or texts for oral instruction. The pupil, or the young reader, who finds out who all these poets were, when they lived, what they wrote, etc., will have learned no small amount of English literary history. If he studies the quotations merely as illustrations of style and expression, or as examples of the poetic diction of various periods, he will have learned some lessons in the history and the use of his mother-tongue. The wood-cuts on pp. 9, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 34, 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 50, and 61 are from Birket Foster's designs ; those on pp. 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, and 38 are from the graceful drawings of "E.V.B." (the Hon. Mrs. Boyle); the rest are from various sources. NOTE TO REVISED EDITION. When I edited this book, ten years ago, I had to depend on others for the collation of the MSS. of the Elegy, except the Pembroke MS., of which I had Mathias's engraved fac-simile. The Egerton MS. was not so much as mentioned by any of the editors or critics up to that date ; and now that I am able to consult the photograph and the owner's re-. print of the Fraser MS. (see page 78, foot-note), I find that all former collations of that (not excepting Mr. Gosse's) are incomplete and inac- curate. I may safely claim that in the present volume the readings of both the Fraser and the Egerton MSS. are for the first time given fully and correctly. The notes on the other poems have also been carefully revised ; and here I have been indebted to Mr. Gosse for a few additional varice lectiones. For the correction of errors in Howitt's transcript of the inscriptions on Gray's monument (pages 18 and 19), I have to thank Mr. J. Willis Westlake, of the State Normal School, Millersville, Pa. Cambridge, Jan. 21, 1886. CONTENTS. PAGE THE LIFE OF THOMAS GRAY, by Robert Carruthers. . 9 STOKE-POGIS, by William Howitt 16 ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD.... 23 MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 43 On the Spring 45 On the Death of a Favourite Cat 48 On a Distant Prospect of Eton College 50 The Progress of Poesy 55 The Bard 61 Hymn to Adversity 68 NOTES 7i Appendix to Notes 138 INDEX 145 STOKE-POGIS CHURCH. THE LIFE OF THOMAS GRAY. By Robert Carruthers. Thomas Gray, the author of the celebrated Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, was born in Cornhill, London, De- cember 26, 1716. His father, Philip Gray, an exchange bro- ker and scrivener, was a wealthy and nominally respectable citizen, but he treated his family with brutal seventy and neg- lect, and the poet was altogether indebted for the advantages of a learned education to the affectionate care and industry of his mother, whose maiden name was Antrobus, and who, in conjunction with a maiden sister, kept a millinery shop. A brother of Mrs. Gray was assistant to the Master of Eton, and was also a fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Under his protection the poet was educated at Eton, and from thence went to Peterhouse, attending college from 1734 to Septem- io THE LIFE OF THOMAS GRAY. ber, 1738. At Eton he had as contemporaries Richard West, son of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and Horace Walpole, son of the triumphant Whig minister, Sir Robert Walpole. West died early in his 26th year, but his genius and virtues and his sorrows will forever live in the correspondence of his friend. In the spring of 1739, Gray was invited by Horace Walpole to accompany him as travelling companion in a tour through France and Italy. They made the usual route, and Gray wrote remarks on all he saw in Florence, Rome, Naples, etc. His observations on arts and antiqui- ties, and his sketches of foreign manners, evince his admir- able taste, learning, and discrimination. Since Milton, no such accomplished English traveller had visited those classic shores. In their journey through Dauphiny, Gray's attention was strongly arrested by the wild and picturesque site of the Grande Chartreuse, surrounded by its dense forest of beech and fir, its enormous precipices, cliffs, and cascades. He visited it a second time on his return, and in the album of the mountain convent he wrote his famous Alcaic Ode. At Reggio the travellers quarrelled and parted. Walpole took the whole blame on himself. He was fond of pleasure and amusements, "intoxicated by vanity, indulgence, and the in- solence of his situation as a prime minister's son " — his own confession — while Gray was studious, of a serious disposition, and independent spirit. The immediate cause of the rupture is said to have been Walpole's clandestinely opening, reading, and resealing a letter addressed to Gray, in which he expect- ed to find a confirmation of his suspicions that Gray had been writing unfavourably of him to some friends in England. A partial reconciliation was effected about three years after- wards by the intervention of a lady, and Walpole redeemed his youthful error by a life-long sincere admiration and re- spect for his friend. From Reggio Gray proceeded to Venice, and thence travelled homewards, attended by a laquais de voyage. He arrived in England in September, 1741, having THE LIFE OF THOMAS GRAY. It been absent about two years and a half. His father died in November, and it was found that the poet's fortune would not enable him to prosecute the study of the law. He therefore retired to Cambridge, and fixed his residence at the univer- sity. There he continued for the remainder of his life, with the exception of about two years spent in London, when the treasures of the British Museum were thrown open. At Cam- bridge he had the range of noble libraries. His happiness consisted in study, and he perused with critical attention the Greek and Roman poets, philosophers, historians, and orators. Plato and the Anthologia he read and annotated with great care, as if for publication. He compiled tables of Greek chronology, added notes to Linnaeus and other naturalists, wrote geographical disquisitions on Strabo ; and, besides be- ing familiar with French and Italian literature, was a zealous archaeological student, and profoundly versed in architecture, botany, painting, and music. In all departments of human learning, except mathematics, he was a master. But it follows that one so studious, so critical, and so fastidious, could not be a voluminous writer. A few poems include all the orig- inal compositions of Gray — the quintessence, as it were, of thirty years of ceaseless study and contemplation, irradiated by bright and fitful gleams of inspiration. In 1742 Gray composed his Ode to Spring, his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, and his Ode to Adversity — productions which most readers of poetry can repeat from memory. He com- menced a didactic poem, On the Alliance of Education and Government, but wrote only about a hundred lines. Every reader must regret that this philosophical poem is but a frag- ment. It is in the style and measure of Dryden, of whom Gray was an ardent admirer and close student. His Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard was completed and published in 1751. In the form of a sixpenny brochure it circulated rapidly, four editions being exhausted the first year. This popularity surprised the poet. He said sarcastically that it 12 THE LIFE OF THOMAS GRAY. was owing entirely to the subject, and that the public would have received it as well if it had been written in prose. The solemn and affecting nature of the poem, applicable to all ranks and classes, no doubt aided its sale ; it required high poetic sensibility and a cultivated taste to appreciate the rapid transitions, the figurative language, and lyrical magnificence of the odes ; but the elegy went home to all hearts ; while its musical harmony, originality, and pathetic train of sentiment and feeling render it one of the most perfect of English poems. No vicissitudes of taste or fashion have affected its popularity. When the original manuscript of the poem was lately (1854) offered for sale, it brought the almost incredible sum of ^131. The two great odes of Gray, The Progress of Poetry and The Bard^ were published in 1757, and were but coldly received. His name, however, stood high, and on the death of Cibber, the same year, he was offered the laureate- ship, which he wisely declined. He was ambitious, however, of obtaining the more congenial and dignified appointment of Professor of Modern History in the University of Cam- bridge, which fell vacant in 1762, and, by the advice of his friends, he made application to Lord Bute, but was unsuccess- ful. Lord Bute had designed it for the tutor of his son-in-law, Sir James Lowther. No one had heard of the tutor, but the Bute influence was all-prevailing. In 1765 Gray took a jour- ney into Scotland, penetrating as far north as Dunkeld and the Pass of Killiecrankie 3 and his account of his tour, in letters to his friends, is replete with interest and with touches of his peculiar humour and graphic description. One other poem proceeded from his pen. In 1768 the Professorship of Modern History was again vacant, and the Duke of Grafton bestowed it upon Gray. A sum of ^400 per annum was thus added to his income ; but his health was precarious — he had lost it, he said, just when he began to be easy in his circumstances. The nomination of the Duke of Grafton to the office of Chancel- lor of the University enabled Gray to acknowledge the favour THE LIFE OF THOMAS GRAY. n conferred on himself. He thought it better that gratitude should sing than expectation, and he honoured his grace's in- stallation with an ode. Such occasional productions are sel- dom happy ; but Gray preserved his poetic dignity and select beauty of expression. He made the founders of Cambridge, as Mr. Hallam has remarked, "pass before our eyes like shadows over a magic glass." When the ceremony of the installation was over, the poet-professor went on a tour to the lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, and few of the beauties of the lake-country, since so famous, escaped his ob- servation. This was to be his last excursion. While at din- ner one day in the college-hall he was seized with an attack of gout in his stomach, which resisted all the powers of med- icine, and proved fatal in less than a week. He died on the 30th of July, i77i,and was buried, according to his own de- sire, beside the remains of his mother at Stoke-Pogis, near Slough, in Buckinghamshire, in a beautiful sequestered village churchyard that is supposed to have furnished the scene of his elegy.* The literary habits and personal peculiarities * A claim has been put up for the churchyard of Granchester, about two miles from Cambridge, the great bell of St. Mary's serving for the "curfew." But Stoke-Pogis is more likely to have been the spot, if any individual locality were indicated. The poet often visited the village, his aunt and mother residing there, and his aunt was interred in the church- yard of the place. Gray's epitaph on his mother is characterized not only by the tenderness with which he always regarded her memory, but by his style and cast of thought. It runs thus: "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 11, 1753, aged 72." She had lived to read the Elegy, which was perhaps an ample recompense for her maternal cares and af- fection. Mrs. Gray's will commences in a similar touching strain : " In the name of God, amen. This is the last will and desire of Dorothy Gray to her son Thomas Gray." [Cunningham's edit, of Johnson's Lives, .] They were all in all to each other. The father's cruelty and neglect, their straitened circumstances, the sacrifices made by the mother to maintain her son at the university, her pride in the talents and conduct of that son, and the increasing gratitude and affection of the latter, nursed in his scho- 14 THE LIFE OF THOMAS GRAY. of Gray are familiar to us from the numerous representa- tions and allusions of his friends. It is easy to fancy the recluse-poet sitting in his college-chambers in the old quad- rangle of Pembroke Hall. His windows are ornamented with mignonette and choice flowers in China vases, but out- side may be discerned some iron-work intended to be ser- viceable as a fire-escape, for he has a horror of fire. His furniture is neat and select ; his books, rather for use than show, are disposed around him. He has a harpsichord in the room. In the corner of one of the apartments is a trunk containing his deceased mother's dresses, carefully folded up and preserved. His fastidiousness, bordering upon effem- inacy, is visible in his gait and manner — in his handsome features and small, well-dressed person, especially when he walk^ abroad and sinks the author and hard student in " the gentleman who sometimes writes for his amusement." He writes always with a crow-quill, speaks slowly and senten- tiously, and shuns the crew of dissonant college revellers, who call him " a prig," and seek to annoy him. Long morn- ings of study, and nights feverish from ill-health, are spent in those chambers ; he is often listless and in low spirits ; yet his natural temper is not desponding, and he delights in em- ployment. He has always something to learn or to commu- nicate — some sally of humour or quiet stroke of satire for his lastic and cloistered solitude — these form an affecting but noble record in the history of genius. [One might infer from the above that Mrs. Gray was not "interred in the churchyard of the place," though the epitaph given immediately after shows that she was ; but the writer refers to the date of the Elegy. Gray in his will directed that he should be laid beside his mother : " First, I do desire that my body may be deposited in the vault, made by my dear mother in the churchyard of Stoke-Pogeis, near Slough in Buckingham- shire, by her remains, in a coffin of seasoned oak, neither lined nor cov- ered, and (unless it be inconvenient) I could wish that one of my executors may see me laid in the grave, and distribute among such honest and in- dustrious poor persons in said parish as he thinks fit, the sum of ten pounds in charity." — Ed.] THE LIFE OF THOMAS GRAY. 15 friends and correspondents — some note on natural history to enter in his journal — some passage of Plato to unfold and illustrate — some golden thought of classic inspiration to in- lay on his page — some bold image to tone down — some verse to retouch and harmonize. His life is on the whole innocent and happy, and a feeling of thankfulness to the Great Giver is breathed over all. Various editions of the collected works of Gray have been published. The first, including memoirs of his life and his correspondence, edited by his friend, the Rev. W. Mason, ap- peared in 1775. It has been often reprinted, and forms the groundwork of the editions by Mathias (1814) and Mitford (1816). Mr. Mitford, in 1843, published Gray's correspond- ence with the Rev. Norton Nicholls ; and in 1854 another collection of Gray's letters was published, edited also by Mr. Mitford. Every scrap of the poet's MSS. is eagerly sought after, and every year seems to add to his popularity as a poet and letter- writer.* In 1778 a monument to Gray was erected in Westminster Abbey by Mason, with the following inscription : No more the Grecian muse unrivall'd reigns, To Britain let the nations homage pay ; She felt a Homer's fire in Milton's strains, A Pindar's rapture in the lyre of Gray. The cenotaph afterwards erected in Stoke Park by Mr. Penn is described below. The frontispiece to this book is from the oil-painting for which Gray sat in the autumn of 1747 to John Giles Eck- hardt, and which was long in the gallery at Strawberry Hill. * To the editions of the complete works of Gray mentioned above should be added the excellent one in four volumes, prepared by Mr. Edmund Gosse (London, 1884). — Ed. WEST-END HOUSE. STOKE-POGIS. FROM HOWITT'S " HOMES AND HAUNTS OF THE BRITISH POETS."* It is at Stoke-Pogis that we seek the most attractive ves- tiges of Gray. Here he used to spend his vacations, not only when a youth at Eton, but during the whole of his future life, while his mother and his aunts lived. Here it was that his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, his celebrated Elegy written in a Cowitry Churchyard, and his Long Story were not only written, but were mingled with the circumstances and all the tenderest feelings of his own life. * Harper's edition, vol. i. p. 314 foil. STOKE -POGIS. I7 His mother and aunts lived at an old-fashioned house in a very retired spot at Stoke, called West-End. This house stood in a hollow, much screened by trees. A small stream ran through the garden, and it is said that Gray used to em- ploy himself when here much in this garden, and that many of the trees still remaining are of his planting. On one side of the house extended an upland field, which was planted round so as to give a charming retired walk \ and at the summit of the field was raised an artificial mound, and upon it was built a sort of arcade or summer-house, which gave full prospect of Windsor and Eton. Here Gray used to delight to sit ; here he was accustomed to read and write much ; and it is just the place to inspire the Ode on Eton College, which lay in the midst of its fine landscape, beautifully in view. The old house inhabited by Gray and his mother has just been pulled down, and replaced by an Elizabethan mansion by the present proprietor, Mr. Penn, of Stoke Park, just by.* The garden, of course, has shared in the change, and now stands gay with its fountain and its modern greenhouse, and, excepting for some fine trees, no longer reminds you of Gray. The woodland walk still remains round the adjoining field, and the summer-house on its summit, though now much cracked by time, and only held together by iron cramps. The trees are now so lofty that they completely obstruct the view, and shut out both Eton and Windsor. # * # # _ # * # # # Stoke Park is about a couple of miles from Slough. The « * This was written (or published, at least) in 1846 ; but Mitford, in the Life of Gray prefixed to the "Eton edition" of his Poems, published in 1847, sa Y s •' "The house, which is now called West-End, lies in a secluded part of the parish, on the road to Fulmer. It has lately been much en- larged and adorned by its present proprietor [Mr. Penn], but the room called ' Gray's ' (distinguished by a small balcony) is still preserved; and a shady walk round an adjoining meadow, with a summer-house on the rising land, are still remembered as favourite places frequented by the poet."— Ed. B jS stoke- pogis. 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, we enter the park just at the monument. This is composed of fine freestone, and consists of a large sarcophagus, sup- ported on a square pedestal, with inscriptions on each side. Three of them are selected from the Ode on Eton College and the Elegy. They are : Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn, Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove; Now drooping, woeful -wan, like one forlorn, Or craz'd with care, or cross'd in hopeless love. One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill, Along the heath, and near his fav'rite tree ; Another came ; nor yet beside the rill, Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he. The second is from the Ode: Ye distant spires, ye antique towers, That crown the watery glade !* Ah, happy hills ! ah, pleasing shade ! Ah, fields belov'd in vain ! Where once my careless childhood stray'd, A stranger yet to pain ! * The eight lines that follow in the poem are not in the inscription, though Howitt gives them. — Ed, STOKE- POG/S. 1Q I feel the gales that from ye blow, A momentary bliss bestow. The third is again from the Elegy: Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap, Each in his narrow cell forever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep The breezy call of incense-breathing morn, The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed, The cock's shrill clarion or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed The fourth bears this inscription : This Monument, in honour of Thomas Gray, Was erected A.D. 1799, Among the scenes Celebrated by that great Lyric and Elegiac Poet He died July 31, 1771, And lies unnoted in the Church-yard adjoining, Under the Tomb-stone on which he piously And pathetically recorded the interment Of his Aunt and lamented Mother. This monument is 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. As you walk on to this, the mansion closes the distant view between the woods with fine effect. The church has often been engraved, and is therefore tolerably familiar to the general reader. It consists of two barn-like structures, with tall roofs, set side by side, and the tower and 20 STOKE-POGIS. finely tapered spire rising above them at the northwest cor- ner. The church is thickly hung with ivy, where " The moping owl may to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest her ancient, solitary reign." The structure is as simple and old-fashioned, both without and within, as any village church can well be. No village, however, is to be seen. Stoke consists chiefly of scattered houses, and this is now in the midst of the park. In the churchyard, " Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap, Each in his narrow cell forever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep." All this is quite literal ; and the tomb of the poet himself, near the southeast window, completes the impression of the scene. It is a plain brick altar tomb, covered with a blue slate slab, and, besides his own ashes, contains those of his mother and aunt. On the slab are inscribed the following lines by Gray himself: "In the vault beneath are deposited, in hope of a joyful resurrection, the remains of Mary Antrobus. She died unmarried, Nov. 5, 1749, aged sixty-six. In the same pious confidence, beside her friend and sister, here sleep the remains of Dorothy Gray, widow ; the careful, tender mother of many children, one of who^m alone had the misfortune to survive her. She died, March n, 1753, aged LXXII." No testimony of the interment of Gray in the same tomb was inscribed anywhere till Mr. Penn, in 1799, erected the monument already mentioned, and placed a small slab in the wall, under the window, opposite to the tomb itself, recording the fact of Gray's burial there. The whole scene is well worthy of a summer day's stroll, especially for such as, pent in the metropolis, know how to enjoy the quiet freshness of the coun- try and the associations of poetry and the past. gray's monument, stoke park. ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. •^ft*. ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. 26 THOMAS GRAY. Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds : ^GwekW-/-^ Save that, from yonder ivy-mantled tower, The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest her ancient solitary reign. ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. 27 w *wA^gvsta*' Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap, Each in his narrow cell forever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep. THOMAS GRAY. *.•*&•& The breezy call of incense-breathing morn, The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed, The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowlv bed. ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. 29 For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening care ; No children run to lisp their sire's return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share. 3o THOMAS GRAY. Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield, Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke: How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke \ 25 ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. 31 Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure ; Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor. 30 32 THOMAS GRAY. The boast of heraldry, the pomp ot power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Awaits alike th' inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave. 35 Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault, If Memory o'er their tomb no trophies raise ; Where, through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault, The pealing anthem swells the note of praise. 4c Can stoned urn or animated bust Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust ? Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death? Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid 45 Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd, Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre : But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page, Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll; Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul. ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. 33 Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear; Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. C 55 34 THOMAS GRAY. Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood, Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country's blood. Th' applause of listening senates to command, The threats of pain and ruin to despise, To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land, And read their history in a nation's eyes, Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib'd alone Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin'd; Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne, And shut the gates of mercy on mankind, ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD, The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide, To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame, Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride With incense kindled at the Muse's flame. 35 7° Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never iearn'd to stray; Along the cool sequester'd vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way. 75 36 THOMAS GRAY. Yet even these bones from insult to protect, Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd, Implores the passing tribute of a sigh. &, Their name, their years, spelt by th' unletter'd Muse, The place of fame and elegy supply; And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist to die. ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. 37 For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing lingering look behind ? 85 38 THOMAS GRAY. On some fond breast the parting soul relies, Some pious drops the closing eye requires ; Even from the tomb the voice of Nature cries, Even in our ashes live their wonted fires. QO For thee, who, mindful of th' unhonour'd dead, Dost in these lines their artless tale relate, If chance, by lonely contemplation led, Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate, 95 ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. 39 Haply some hoary-headed swain may say, "Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn Brushing with hasty steps the dews away, To meet the sun upon the upland lawn. 4o THOMAS GRAY ?ftr "There at the foot of yonder nodding beech, That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high, His listless length at noontide would he stretch, And pore upon the brook that babbles by. ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. "Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn, Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove; Now drooping, woeful-wan, like one forlorn, Or craz'd with care, or cross'd in hopeless love. 4i 105 "One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill, Along the heath, and near his favourite tree; Another came; nor yet beside the fill, Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he ; -~H~a^ r»> < "The next, with dirges due in sad array, Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne. Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay Grav'd on the stone beneath yon aged thorn." "5 42 THOMAS GRAY. THE EPITAPH. Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth A youth, to Fortune and to Fame unknown; Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth, And Melancholy mark'd him for her own. Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere, Heaven did a recompense as largely send; He gave to Misery all he had, a tear; He gain'cl from Heaven ('twas all he wish'd) a friend, No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose) The bosom of his Father and his God. 125 fa*s9pa£r^r MISCELLANEOUS POEMS. ON THE SPRING. Lo ! where the rosy-bosom'd Hours. Fair Venus' train, appear, Disclose the long-expecting flowers, And wake the purple year ! The Attic warbler pours her throat, Responsive to the cuckoo's note, 4 6 THOMAS GRAY. The untaught harmony of spring ; While, whispering pleasure as they fly, Cool Zephyrs thro' the clear blue sky Their gather'd fragrance fling. Where'er the oak's thick branches stretch A broader browner shade, Where'er the rude and moss-grown beech O'ercanopies the glade, Beside some water's rushy brink 15 With me the Muse shall sit, and think (At ease reclin'd in rustic state) How vain the ardour of the crowd, How low, how little are the proud, How indigent the great ! 20 Still is the toiling hand of Care ; The panting herds repose : Yet hark, how thro' the peopled air The busy murmur glows ! The insect youth are on the wing, 25 Eager to taste the honied spring, And float amid the liquid noon : Some lightly o'er the current skim. Some show their gayly-gilded trim Quick-glancing to the sun. 30 To Contemplation's sober eye Such is the race of Man ; And they that creep, and they that fly, Shall end where they began. ON THE SPRING. ^ Alike the busy and the gay 35 But flutter thro' life's little day, In Fortune's varying colours drest : Brush'd by the hand of rough Mischance, Or chilPd by age, their airy dance They leave, in dust to rest. 4 o Methinks I hear in accents low The sportive kind reply : Poor moralist ! and what art thou ? A solitary fly ! Thy joys no glittering female meets, 45 No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets, No painted plumage to display : On hasty wings thy youth is flown ; Tny sun is set. thy spring is gone— We frolic while 'tis May. 50 ON THE DEATH OF A FAVOURITE CAT Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes, 'Twas on a lofty vase's side, Where China's gayest art had dyed The azure flowers that blow; Demurest of the tabby kind r The pensive Selima, reclin'd, 5 Gaz'd on the lake below. Her conscious tail her joy declar'd : The fair round face, the snowy beard, The velvet of her paws, Her coat, that with the tortoise vies, 10 Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes, She saw; and purr'd applause. ON THE DEATH OF A FAVOURITE CAT 49 Still had she gaz'd ; but midst the tide Two angel forms were seen to glide, The Genii of the stream : 15 Their scaly armour's Tyrian hue Through richest purple to the view Betray'd a golden gleam. The hapless nymph with wonder saw : A whisker first, and then a claw, 20 With many an ardent wish, She stretch'd in vain to reach the prize. What female heart can gold despise ? What Cat's averse to fish ? Presumptuous maid ! with looks intent 25 Again she stretch'd, again she bent, Nor knew the gulf between. (Malignant Fate sat by, and smil'd.) 1 he slippery verge her feet beguil'd, She tumbled headlong in. 30 Eight times emerging from the flood, She mew'd to every watery God, Some speedy aid to send. No Dolphin came, no Nereid stirr'd : Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard. 35 A favourite has no friend ! From hence, ye beauties, undeceiv'd, Know, one false step is ne'er retriev'd., And be with caution bold. Not all that tempts your wandering eyes 40 And heedless hearts is lawful prize, Nor all that glisters gold. D ON A DISTANT PROSPECT OF ETON COLLEGE "AvOpwrros, inavh irpocpacts eh to bvarvxetv.— MENANDER. Ye distant spires, ye antique towers, That crown the watery glade, Where grateful Science still adores Her Henry's holy shade ; ON A DISTANT PROSPECT OF ETON COLLEGE. 51 And ye, that from the stately brow 5 Of Windsor's heights th' 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 : 10 Ah, happy hills ! ah, pleasing shade ! Ah, fields belov'd in vain ! Where once my careless childhood stray'd, A stranger yet to pain ! I feel the gales that from ye blow 15 A momentary bliss bestow, As, waving fresh their gladsome wing, My weary soul they seem to soothe, And, redolent of joy and youth, To breathe a second spring. 20 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 enhrall? What idle progeny succeed To chase the rolling circle's speed, Or urge the flying ball ? ao While some, on earnest business bent, Their murmuring labours ply 'Gainst graver hours that bring constraint To sweeten liberty, 53 THOMAS GRAY. Some bold adventurers disdain 3$ 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. 4c Gay hope is theirs by fancy fed, Less pleasing when possest; The tear forgot as soon as shed, The sunshine of the breast : Theirs buxom health of rosy hue, 45 Wild wit, invention ever new, And lively cheer of vigour born; The thoughtless day, the easy night, The spirits pure, the slumbers light, That fly th' approach of morn. 50 Alas ! regardless of their doom, The little victims play; No sense have they of ills to come. No care beyond to-day : Yet see how all around 'em wait 55 The ministers of human fate, And black Misfortune's baleful train ! Ah, show them where in ambush stand To seize their prey the murtherous band ! Ah, tell them, they are men ! 60 These shall the fury Passions tear, The vultures of the mind, Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear, And Shame that skulks behind; ON A DISTANT PROSPECT OF ETON COLLEGE. 53 Or pining Love shall waste their youth, 65 Or Jealousy with rankling tooth, That inly gnaws the secret heart; And Envy wan, and faded Care, Grim-visag'd comfortless Despair, And Sorrow's piercing dart. 70 Ambition this shall tempt to rise, Then whirl the wretch from high, To bitter Scorn a sacrifice, And grinning Infamy. The stings of Falsehood those shall try. 75 And hard Unkindness' alter'd eye, That mocks the tear it forc'd to flow; And keen Remorse, with blood defiTd, And moody Madness laughing wild Amid severest woe. 80 Lo ! in the vale of years beneath A grisly troop are seen, The painful family of Death, More hideous than their queen : This racks the joints, this fires the veins, ** That every labouring sinew strains, Those in the deeper vitals rage : Lo ! Poverty, to fill the band, That numbs the soul with icy hand, And slow-consuming Age. s° To each his sufferings : all are men, Condemn'd alike to groan; The tender for another's pain, Th' unfeeling for his own. 54 THOMAS GRAY. 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. 95 xeo SEAL OF ETON COLLEGE. APOLLO CITHARCEDUS. FROM THE VATICAN. THE PROGRESS OF POESY, A Pindaric Ode. 4>a)vavTa auveToHcriv ' er Ae to itav ep/J-riveaiv XaTi£e*. — Pindar, OL el I. I. Awake, ^Eolian 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 lound 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 rolling down the steep amain, Headlong, impetuous, see it pour ; The rocks and nodding groves rebellow to the roar. 56 THOMAS GRAY. I. 2. Oh ! Sovereign of the willing soul, Parent of sweet and solemn-breathing airs, Enchanting shell ! the sullen Cares i 5 And frantic Passions hear thy soft control. On Thracia's hills the Lord of War Has curb'd the fury of his car, And dropt his thirsty lance at thy command. Perching on the sceptred hand 20 Of Jove, thy magic lulls the feather'd king With ruffled plumes and flagging wing: Quench'd in dark clouds of slumber lie The terror of his beak, and lightnings of his eye. 1.3. Thee the voice, the dance, obey, 25 Temper'd to thy warbled lay. O'er Idalia's velvet-green The rosy-crowned Loves are seen On Cytherea's day With antic Sports, and blue-eyed Pleasures, 30 Frisking light in frolic measures; Now pursuing, now retreating, Now in circling troops they meet : To brisk notes in cadence beating, Glance their many-twinkling feet. 35 Slow melting strains their Queen's approach declare : Where'er she turns the Graces homage pay. With arms sublime, that float upon the air, In gliding state she wins her easy way : O'er her warm cheek, and rising bosom, move 40 The bloom of young Desire and purple light of Love. THE PROGRESS OF POESY. 57 II. I. Man's feeble race what ills await ! Labour, and Penury, the racks of Pain, Disease, and Sorrow's weeping train, And Death, sad refuge from the storms of Fate ! 45 The fond complaint, my song, disprove, And justify the laws of Jove. Say, has he given in vain the heavenly Muse ? Night and all her sickly dews, Her spectres wan, and birds of boding cry, 50 He gives to range the dreary sky ; Till down the eastern cliffs afar Hyperion's march they spy, and glittering shafts of war. 11. 2. In climes beyond the solar road, Where shaggy forms o'er ice-built mountains roam, 55 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, 60 In loose numbers wildly sweet, Their feather-cinctur'd chiefs, and dusky loves. Her track, where'er the Goddess roves, Glory pursue, and generous Shame, Th' unconquerable Mind, and Freedom's holy flame. 65 II. 3. Woods, that wave o'er Delphi's steep, Isles, that crown th' ^Egean deep, 58 THOMAS GRAY. DELPHI AND MOUNT PARNASSUS. Fields, that cool Ilissus laves, Or where Maeander's amber waves In lingering labyrinths creep, How do your tuneful echoes languish, Mute, but to the voice of anguish ! Where each old poetic mountain Inspiration breath'd around ; Every shade and hallow'd fountain Murmur'd deep a solemn sound : Till the sad Nine, in Greece's evil hour, Left their Parnassus for the Latian plains. Alike they scorn the pomp of tyrant Power, And coward Vice, that revels in her chains. When Latium had her lofty spirit lost, They sought, O Albion ! next thy sea-encircled coast. 70 75 80 THE PROGRESS OF POESY. 59 III. I. Far from the sun and summer gale, In thy green lap was Nature's darling laid, What time, where lucid Avon stray'd, To him the mighty mother did unveil Her awful face : the dauntless child Stretch'd forth his little arms and smiPd. "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 horror that, and thrilling fears, Or ope the sacred source of sympathetic tears." 85 90 THE AVON AND STRATFORD CHURCH. 6o THOMAS GRAY. ill. 2. Nor second He, that rode sublime 95 Upon the seraph wings of Ecstasy, The secrets of th' abyss to spy. He pass'd the flaming bounds of place and time : The living throne, the sapphire blaze, Where angels tremble while they gaze, 100 He saw ; but, blasted with excess of light, Clos'd 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, . 105 With necks in thunder cloth'd, and long-resounding pace. in. 3. Hark, his hands the lyre explore ! Bright-eyed Fancy hovering o'er Scatters from her pictur'd urn Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn no But ah ! 'tis heard no more Oh ! lyre divine, what daring spirit Wakes thee now 7 ? Tho' he inherit Nor the pride, nor ample pinion, That the Theban eagle bear, us Sailing with supreme dominion Thro' the azure deep of air, Yet oft before his infant eyes would run Such forms as glitter in the Muse's ray With orient hues, unborrow'd of the sun : 120 Yet shall he mount, and keep his distant way Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate, Beneath the Good how far — but far above the Great. THE BARD. A Pindaric Ode. I. I. " Ruin seize thee, ruthless King ! Confusion on thy banners wait; Tho' fann'd 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 62 THOMAS GRAY. To save thy secret soul from nightly fears, From Cambria's curse, from Cambria's tears I" Such were the sounds that o'er the crested pride Of the first Edward scatter'd wild dismay, 10 As down the steep of Snowdon's shaggy side He wound with toilsome march his long array. Stout Gloster stood aghast in speechless trance : " To arms !" cried Mortimer, and couch'd his quivering lance. I. 2. On a rock whose haughty brow 15 Frowns o'er old Conway's foaming flood, Rob'd in the sable garb of woe, With haggard eyes the poet stood (Loose his beard, and hoary hair Stream'd, like a meteor, to the troubled air), 20 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, 25 Revenge on thee in hoarser murmurs breathe; Vocal no more, since Cambria's fatal clay, To high-born Hoel's harp, or soft Llewellyn's lay. 1.3. " Cold is Cadwallo's tongue, That hush'd 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-topt head. THE BARD. 63 On dreary Arvon's shore they lie, 35 Smear'd with gore, and ghastly pale : Far, far aloof th' affrighted ravens sail ; The famish'd eagle screams, and passes by. Dear lost companions of my tuneful art, Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes, 40 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 grisly band, I see them sit, they linger yet, 4S Avengers of their native land: With me in dreadful harmony they join, And weave with bloody hands the tissue of thy line. 11. 1. " Weave the warp, and weave the woof, The winding-sheet of Edward's race. 50 Give ample room, and verge enough The characters of hell to trace. Mark the year, and mark the night, When Severn shall reecho with affright The shrieks of death thro' Berkeley's roofs that ring, 55 Shrieks of an agonizing king ! She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs, That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate, From thee be born, who o'er thy country hangs The scourge of heaven. What terrors round him wait! 60 Amazement in his van, with Flight combin'd, And Sorrow's faded form, and Solitude behind. 11. 2. " Mighty victor, mighty lord ! Low on his funeral couch he lies ! 64 THOMAS GRAY. No pitying heart, no eye, afford . A tear to grace his obsequies. Is the sable warrior fled ? Thy son is gone. He rests among the dead. The swarm that in thy noontide beam were born ? Gone to salute the rising morn. 7 o Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows, While proudly riding o'er the azure realm In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes ; Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm ; Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway, 75 That, hush'd in grim repose, expects his evening prey. 11. 3. " Fill high the sparkling bowl, The rich repast prepare ; Reft of a crown, he yet may share the feast . Close by the regal chair 80 Fell Thirst and Famine scowl A baleful smile upon their baffled guest. Heard ye the din of battle bray, Lance to lance, and horse to horse ? Long years of havoc urge their destined course, 85 And thro' the kindred squadrons mow their way. Ye towers of Julius, London's lasting shame, With many a foul and midnight murther fed, Revere his consort's faith, his father's fame, And spare the meek usurper's holy head. 90 Above, below, the rose of snow, Twin'd with her blushing foe, we spread : The bristled boar in infant gore Wallows beneath the thorny shade. Now, brothers, bending o'er the accursed loom, 95 Stamp we our vengeance deep, and ratify his doom. THE BARD. 65 THE BLOODY TOWER. III. I. " Edward, lo ! to sudden fate (Weave we the woof. The thread is spun.) Half of thy heart we consecrate. (The web is wove. The work is done.) Stay, oh stay ! nor thus forlorn Leave me unbless'd, unpitied, here to mourn : In yon bright track, that fires the western skies, They melt, they vanish from my eyes. E 66 THOMAS GRAY. But oh ! what solemn scenes on Snowdon's height 105 Descending slow their glittering skirts unroll ? Visions of glory, spare my aching sight ! Ye unborn ages, crowd not on my soul ! No more our long-lost Arthur we bewail. All hail, ye genuine kings, Britannia's issue, hail ! no in. 2. "Girt with many a baron bold . Sublime their starry fronts they rear; And gorgeous dames, and statesmen old In bearded majesty, appear. In the midst a form divine ! 115 Her eye proclaims her of the Briton line; Her lion-port, her awe-commanding face, Attemper'd sweet to virgin-grace. What strings symphonious tremble in the air, What strains of vocal transport round her play ! 120 Hear from the grave, great Taliessin, hear; They breathe a soul to animate thy clay. Bright Rapture calls, and soaring as she sings, Waves in the eye of heaven her many-colour'd wings. in. 3. " The verse adorn again 12s Fierce War, and faithful Love, And Truth severe, by fairy Fiction drest. In buskin'd measures move Pale Grief, and pleasing Pain, With Horror, tyrant of the throbbing breast. 130 A voice, as of the cherub-choir, Gales from blooming Eden bear; And distant warblings lessen on my ear, That lost in long futurity expire. THE BARD, Fond impious man, think'st thou yon sanguine cloud, Rais'd by thy breath, has quench'd the orb of day ? To-morrow he repairs the golden flood, And warms the nations with redoubled ray. Enough for me; with joy I see The different doom our fates assign. Be thine despair, and sceptred care; To triumph, and to die, are mine." He spoke, and headlong from the mountain's height Deep in the roaring tide he plung'd to endless night. 67 135 140 QUEEN ELIZABETH. HYMN TO ADVERSITY. 7,hva Tov (ppoveiv fiporovs 66(0- aavTa, tw 7rd0et naOav Qevra Kvpia>? e'xefi/. -^Eschylus, Agatn. Daughter of Jove, relentless power, Thou tamer of the human breast, Whose iron scourge and torturing hour The bad affright, afflict the best ! Bound in thy adamantine chain, 5 The proud are taught to taste of pain, And purple tyrants vainly groan With pangs unfelt before, unpitied and alone. When first thy sire to send on earth Virtue, his darling child, design'd, ic To thee he gave the heavenly birth, And bade to form her infant mind. Stern rugged nurse ! thy rigid lore With patience many a year she bore : W r hat sorrow was, thou bad'st her know, 15 And from her own she leaned to melt at others' woe. HYMN TO ADVERSITY. 69 Scar'd at thy frown terrific, fly Self-pleasing Folly's idle brood, Wild Laughter, Noise, and thoughtless Joy, And leave us leisure to be good. 20 Light they disperse, and with them go The summer friend, the flattering foe ; By vain Prosperity receiv'd, To her they vow their truth, and are again believ'd. Wisdom in sable garb array'd, 25 Immersed in rapturous thought profound, And Melancholy, silent maid, With leaden eye that loves the ground, Still on thy solemn steps attend; Warm Charity, the general friend, 30 With Justice, to herself severe, And Pity, dropping soft the sadly-pleasing tear. Oh! gently on thy suppliant's head, Dread goddess, lay thy chastening hand ! Not in thy Gorgon tenors clad, 35 Not circled with the vengeful band (As by the impious thou art seen), With thundering voice and threatening mien, With screaming Horror's funeral cry, Despair, and fell Disease, and ghastly Poverty : 40 Thy form benign, O goddess, wear, Thy milder influence impart; Thy philosophic train be there To soften, not to wound, my heart. The generous spark extinct revive, 45 Teach me to love and to forgive, Exact my own defects to scan, What others are to feel, and know mvself a Man. BERKELEY CASTLE. " Mark the year, and mark the night, When Severn shall reecho with affright The shrieks of death thro' Berkeley's roofs that ring, Shrieks of an agonizing king!" The Bard, 53. NOTES LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS A. S., Anglo-Saxon Arc, Milton's Arcades. C. T., Chaucer's Canter out y 'j. ales. Cf. (confer), compare. D. V., Goldsmith's Deserted Village. Ep., Epistle, Epode. Foil, following. F. Q., Spenser's Faerie Queene. Gosse, Mr. Edmund Gosse's Works of Thomas Gray (London, 1884). H.. Haven's Rhetoric (Harper's edition). Hales, Longer English Poems, edited by Rev. T. W. Hales (London, 1872)* II Pens., Milton's II Penseroso. L'AIL, " V Allegro. 01., Pindar's Olympian Odes. P. L., Milton's Paradise Lost. P. R., " " Regained. S. A., " Samson Agonistes. Shakes. Gr., Abbott's Shakespearian Grammar (the references are to sections, not pages). Shep. Kal., Spenser's Shepherd" 1 s Kalendar. St., stanza. Wb., Webster's Dictionary (last revised quarto eaition). Wore, Worcester's Dictionary (quarto edition). Other abbreviations (names of books in the Bible, plays of Shakespeare, works of Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, etc.) need no explanation. NOTES. ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. This poem was begun in the year 1742, but was not finished until 1750, when Gray sent it to Walpole with a letter (dated June 12, 1750) in which he says : " I have been here at Stoke a few days (where I shall continue good part of the summer), and having put an end to a thing, whose begin- ning you have seen long ago, I immediately send it you. You will, I hope, look upon it in the light of a thing with an end to it : a merit that most of my writings have wanted, and are like to want." It was shown in manuscript to some of the author's friends, and was published in 175 1 only because it was about to be printed surreptitiously. February 11, 1751, Gray wrote to Walpole that the proprietors of "the Magazine of Magazines " were about to publish his Elegy, and added, " 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 Churchyard.' If he would add a line or two to say 74 NOTES. it came into his hands by accident, I should like it better." Walpole did as requested, and wrote an advertisement to the effect that accident alone brought the poem before the public, although an apology was un- necessary to any but the author. On which Gray wrote, " I thank you for your advertisement, which saves my honour." Dodsley's proof-reading must have been somewhat careless, for there are many errors of the press in this editio princeps. Gray writes to Walpole, under date of " Ash- Wednesday, Cambridge, 1751," as follows: " Nurse Dodsley has given it a pinch or two in the cradle, that (I doubt) it will bear the marks of as long as it lives. But no matter : we have ourselves suffered under her hands before now ; and besides, it will only look the more careless and by accident as it were." Again, March 3, 1 75 1, he writes: " I do not expect any more editions ; as I have appeared in more magazines than one. The chief errata were sacred for secret ; hidden for kindred (in spite of dukes and classics) ; and ''frowning as in scorn' for smiling. I humbly propose, for the benefit of Mr. Dodsley and his matrons, that take awake [in line 92, which at first read " awake and faithful to her wonted fires "] for a verb, that they should read asleep^ and all will be right." A writer in Notes and Queries, June 12, 1875, states that the poem first appeared in the London Magazine, March, 175 1, p. 134, and that "the Magazine of Magazines" is "a gentle term of scorn used by Gray to indi- cate " that periodical, and not the name of any actual magazine. But in the next number of Notes and Queries (June 19, 1875) Mr. F. Locker informs us that he has in his possession a title-page of the Grand Maga- zine of Magazines, and the page of the number for April, 1*751, which contains the Elegy. The magazine is said to be " collected and digested by Roger Woodville, Esq.," and "published by Cooper at the Globe, in Pater Noster Row." The facts are, that the poem was first published by Dodsley on the 16th of February, 1751 (Gosse, vol. i. p. 72) ; that it appeared in the Magazine of Magazines for February, issued at the end' of that month, according to the custom of the time ;* that it was next printed in the London Magazine for March; and again in the Grand Magazine of Maga- zines for April. In the Magazine of Magazines, the poem is introduced as follows {Chambers' 's Book of Days, vol. ii. p. 146) : " Some imaginary literary wag is made to rise in a convivial assembly, and thus announce it : ' Gentle- men, give me leave to soothe my own melancholy, and amuse you in a most noble manner, with a full copy of verses by the very ingenious Mr. Gray, of Peterhouse, Cambridge. They are stanzas written in a country churchyard.' Then follow the verses." * Ignorance or oversight of this custom has led the editors, with the single exception of Gosse, to assume that the appearance of the poem in the February number of the magazine must have been earlier than Dodsley's publication of it on the 16th of February. But we find the latter chronicled in the ''monthly catalogue" of new books in the February number of the London Magazine thus: "An Elegy wrote in a Church-yard, pr. 6d. Dodsley." In the March number of the same magazine we find a summary of current news down to Sunday, March 31. ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. ? c Gray says nothing in his letters of the appearance of the Elegy in the London Magazine. The full title of that periodical was " The London Magazine : or Gentleman's Monthly Intelligencer." The editor's name was not given; the publisher was " R. Baldwin, jun. at the Rose in Pater- Noster Row." The volume for 1751 was the 20th, and the Preface (writ- ten at the close of the year) begins thus : " As the two most formidable Enemies we have ever had, are now extinct, we have great Reason to conclude, that it is only the Merit, and real Usefulness of our Collec- tion, that hath supported its Sale and Reputation for Twenty Years." A foot-note informs us that the "Enemies" are the "Magazine of Maga- zines and Grand Magazine of Magazines." The author's name is not given with the Elegy as printed in the Lon* don Magazine. The poem is sandwiched between an "Epilogue to Alfred, a Masque" and some coarse rhymes entitled " Strip-Me-Naked, or Royal Gin for ever." There is not even a printer's "rule" or "dash" to sepa- rate the title of the latter from the last line of the Elegy. The poem is more correctly printed than in Dodsley's authorized edition; though, queerly enough, it has " winds " in the second line and the parenthesis " (all he had) " in the Epitaph. The only other misprints worth noting are, " Their harrow oft," " Or wake to extasy the living lyre," and " shapeless culture deck'd."* The authorized though anonymous edition was thus briefly noticed by The Monthly Review, the critical Rhadamanthus of the day : "An Elegy in a Country Churchyard. 4to. Dodsley's. Seven pages. — The excel- lence of this little piece amply compensates for its want of quantity." " Soon after its publication," says Mason, " I remember, sitting with Mr. Gray in his College apartment, he expressed to me his surprise at the rapidity of its sale. I replied : ' Sunt lacrymae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.' He paused awhile, and taking his pen, wrote the line on a printed copy of it lying on his table. ' This,' said he, ' shall be its future motto.' *■ Pity,' cried I, ■ that Dr. Young's Night Thoughts have preoccupied it.' ' So,' replied he, 'indeed it is.'" Gray himself tells the story of its success on the margin of the manuscript copy of the Elegy preserved at Cambridge among his papers, and reproduced in facsimile in Mathias's elegant edition of the poet. The following is a careful transcript of the memorandum : "publish'd in | Feb : T ?. 1751. | by Dodsley : & | went thro' four | Edi- tions ; in two | months ; and af- | terwards a fifth, | 6 th 7 th & 8 th 9 th & 10 th I & 11 th I printed also in 1753, | with M r Bentley's | Designs, of w ch I there is a 2 d Edition | & again by Dodsley | in his Miscellany, | Vol : 4 th & in a I Scotch Collection | call'd the Union. | translated into | Latin by Chr : Anstey | Esq, & the Rev d M r | Roberts, & publish'd | in 1762; & again | in the same year | by Rob : Lloyd, M : A :" * We have not been able to find the Mz^zzine of Magazines or the Grand Magazine of Magazines in the libraries, and know nothing about either " of our own knowledge." The London Magazine is in the Harvard College Library, and the statements concern- ing that we can personally vouch for. 7 6 NOTES. "One peculiar and remarkable tribute to the merit of the Elegy" says Professor Henry Reed, "is to be noticed in the great number of transla- tions which have been made of it into various languages, both of ancient and modern Europe. It is the same kind of tribute which has been ren- dered to Robinson Cncsoe and to The Pilgrim's Progress, and is proof of the same universality of interest, transcending the limits of language and of race. To no poem in the English language has the same kind of homage been paid so abundantly. Of what other poem is there a poly- glot edition ? Italy and England have competed with their polyglot editions of the Elegy : Torri's, bearing the title, ' Elegia di Tomaso Gray sopra un Cimitero di Campagna, tradotta dall' Inglese in piii lingue : Verona, 1817; Livorno, 1843 »' aR d Van Voorst's London edition." Pro- fessor Reed adds a list of the translations (which, however, is incom- plete), including one in Hebrew, seven in Greek, twelve in Latin, thirteen in Italian, fifteen in French, six in German, and one in Portuguese. " Had Gray written nothing but his Elegy" remarks Byron, " high as he stands, I am not sure that he would not stand higher ; it is the corner- stone of his glory." The tribute paid the poem by General Wolfe is familiar to all, but we cannot refrain from quoting Lord Mahon's beautiful account of it in his History of England. On the night of September 13th, 1759, the night before the battle on the Plains of Abraham, Wolfe was descending the St. Lawrence with a part of his troops. The historian says : " Swiftly, but silently, did the boats fall down with the tide, unobserved by the enemy's sentinels at their posts along the shore. Of the soldiers on board, how eagerly must every heart have throbbed at the coming con- flict ! how intently must every eye have contemplated the dark outline, as it lay pencilled upon the midnight sky, and as every moment it grew closer and clearer, of the hostile heights ! Not a word was spoken — not a sound heard beyond the rippling of the stream. Wolfe alone — thus tradition has told us — repeated in a low tone to the other officers in his boat those beautiful stanzas with which a country churchyard inspired the muse of Gray. One noble line, ' The paths of glory lead but to the grave,' must have seemed at such a moment fraught with mournful meaning. At the close of the recitation Wolfe added, ' Now, gentlemen, I would rather be the author of that poem than take Quebec' " Hales, in his Introduction to the poem, remarks : " The Elegy is per- haps the most widely known poem in our language. The reason of this extensive popularity is perhaps to be sought in the fact that it expresses in an exquisite manner feelings and thoughts that are universal. In the current of ideas in the Elegy there is perhaps nothing that is rare, or ex- ceptional, or out of the common way. The musings are of the most rational and obvious character possible ; it is difficult to conceive of any one musing under similar circumstances who should not muse so ; but they are not the less deep and moving on this account. The mystery of life does not become clearer, or less solemn and awful, for any amount of contemplation. Such inevitable, such everlasting questions as rise on the mind when one lingers in the precincts of Death can never lose their ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. 77 freshness, never cease to fascinate and to move. It is with such ques- tions, that would have been commonplace long ages since if they could ever be so, that the Elegy deals. It deals with them in no lofty philo- sophical manner, but in a simple, humble, unpretentious way, always with the truest and the broadest humanity. The poet's thoughts turn to the poor ; he forgets the fine tombs inside the church, and thinks only of the * mouldering heaps' in the churchyard. Hence the problem that espe- cially suggests itself is the potential greatness, when they lived, of the 1 rude forefathers ' that now lie at his feet. He does not, and cannot solve it, though he finds considerations to mitigate the sadness it must inspire ; but he expresses it in all its awfulness in the most effective language and with the deepest feeling ; and his expression of it has become a living part of our language." The writer in the North American Review (vol. 96) from whom we have elsewhere quoted says of the Elegy : " It is upon this that Gray's fame as a poet must chiefly rest. By this he will be known forever alike to the lettered and the unlettered. Many, in future ages, who may never have heard of his classic Odes, his various learning, or his sparkling letters, will revere him only as the author of the Elegy. For this he will be en- shrined through all time in the hearts of the myriads who shall speak our English tongue. For this his name will be held in glad remem- brance in the far-off summer isles of the Pacific, and amidst the waste of polar snows. If he had written nothing else, his place as a leading poet in our language would still be assured. Many have asserted, with John- son, that he was a mere mechanical poet — one who brought from without, but never found within ; that the gift of inspiration was not native to him ; that his imagination was borrowed finery, his fancy tinsel, and his invention the world's well-worn jewels ; that whatever in his verse was poetic w r as not new r , and what was new was not poetic ; that he was only an unworldly dyspeptic, living amid many books, and laboriously delving for a lifetime between musty covers, picking out now and then another's gems and bits of ore, and fashioning them into ill-compacted mosaics, which he wrongly called his own. To all this the Elegy is a sufficient answer. It is not old — it is not bookish ; it is new and human. Books could not make its maker : he was born of the divine breath alone. Consider all the commentators, the scholiasts, the interpreters, the anno- tators, and other like book-worms, from Aristarchus down to Doderlein ; and may it not be said that, among them all, ' Nee viget quidquam sim- ile aut secundum ?' " Gray wrote but little, yet he wrote that little well. He might have done far more for us; the same is true of most men, even of the greatest. The possibilities of a life are always in advance of its performance. But we cannot say that his life was a wasted one. Even this little Elegy alone should go for much. For, suppose that he had never written this, but instead had done much else in other ways, according to his powers : that he had written many learned treatises ; that he had, with keen criti- cism, expounded and reconstructed Greek classics ; that he had, per- chance, sat upon the woolsack, and laid rich offerings at the feet of blind Justice ; — taking the years together, would it haye been, on the whole, 78 NOTES. better for him or for us ? Would he have added so much to the sum of human happiness ? He might thus have made himself a power for a time, to be dethroned by some new usurper in the realm of knowledge ; now he is a power and a joy forever to countless thousands." Three manuscripts of the Elegy, in Gray's handwriting, still exist. The poet bequeathed his library, letters, and many miscellaneous papers, to his friends the Rev. William Mason and the Rev. James Browne, as joint liter- ary executors. Mason bequeathed the entire trust to Mr. Stonhewer. The latter, in making his will, divided the legacy into two parts. The larger share went to the Master and Fellows of Pembroke Hall. Among the pa- pers, which are still in the possession of the College, was found a copy of the Elegy. An excellent fac-simile of this manuscript appears in Mathias's edition of Gray, published in 1814, and from this our readings are taken. In referring to it hereafter we shall designate it as the " Pembroke" MS. The remaining portion of Gray's literary bequest, including the other manuscript of the Elegy, was left by Mr. Stonhewer to his friend, Mr. Bright. In 1845 Mr. Bright's sons sold the collection at auction. The MS. of the Elegy was bought by Mr. Granville John Penn, of Stoke Park, for one hundred pounds — the highest sum that had ever been known to be paid for a single sheet of paper. In 1854 this manuscript came again into the market, and was knocked down to Mr. Robert Charles Wright- son, of Birmingham, for ^131. On the 28th of May, 1875, ^ was onc e more offered for sale in London, and was purchased by Sir William Fraser for £ 2 3°i or about $1150. A photographic reproduction of it. was published in London in 1862, and a transcript (100 copies), edited by Sir William Fraser, was printed in 1884.* For convenience we shall refer to it as the " Fraser " MS. Gosse calls it the " Mason " MS. There can be little doubt that the Fraser MS. is the original one, and that the Pembroke MS. is a fair copy made from it by the poet. The former contains a greater number of alterations, and varies more from the printed text. It bears internal evidence of being the rough draft, while the other represents a later stage of the poem. The third MS., which belonged to, Wharton and is now among the Egerton MSS. (No. 2400) in the British Museum, was evidently written a little earlier than the Pembroke MS., from which it differs but slightly. The Fraser MS., like the other two, has in the first stanza, "The lowing Herd wind slowly," etc. See our note on this line, p. 83 below. In the 2d stanza, it reads, " And now the Air," and " Or drowzy." In 3d stanza, it has "stray too" written above "wandring," and "& pry into" above "Molest her ;" as if the poet had thought of reading " Of such as stray too near her secret bower And pry into her solitary reign." * We have had the privilege of consulting a copy of the photograph belonging to Rev. James Freeman Clarke, D.D., of Boston, as well as the Fraser reprint in the pos- session of the Harpers. We are also indebted to Dr. Clarke for the use of an exact transcript of the Egerton MS. made for him at the British Museum. The two stanzas of which a fac-simile is given on page 73 are from the Pembroke MS., but the wood-cut hardly does justice to the feminine delicacy of the poet's handwriting. ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. 79 In 4th stanza, "Village" is crossed out,* and " Hamlet" written above. The 5th stanza is as follows : "For ever sleep: the breezy Call of Morn, Or Swallow twitt'ring from the strawbuilt Shed, Or Chaunticleer so shrill or ecchoing Horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly Bed." The 6th stanza has "Nor climb;" and "envied" is written above "coming," which is underlined, and "doubtful " is put in the margin as an alternative reading. In 8th stanza, "useful" is underlined, and "homely" put in the margin; and the next line has "rustic Joys." In 10th stanza, the first two lines read : " Forgive ye Proud th' involuntary Fault, If Memory to these no Trophies raise." The nth stanza has "awake the silent Dust," with "awake" under- lined and " provoke " in the margin. The 12th stanza has "Reins of Empire." The next stanza in the MS. (marked, however, for transposition) reads thus: "Some Village Cato with dauntless Breast The little Tyrant of his Fields withstood ; Some mute inglorious Tully here may rest ; Some Caesar, guiltless of his Country's Blood. "t * It should be understood that words are not crossed out in the MS. when others are written above, below, or in the margin, except in the instances specified by us. t The Saturday Review for June 19, 1875, has a long article entitled, "A Lesson from Gray s Elegy," from which we cull the following paragraphs: "Gray, having first of all put down the names of three Komans as illustrations of his meaning, afterwards deliberately struck them out and put the names of three Englishmen instead. This is a sign of a change in the taste of the age, a change with which Gray himself had a good deal to do. The deliberate wiping out of the names of Cato, Tully, and Caesar, to put in the names of Hampden, Milton, and Cromwell, seems to us so ob- viously a change for the better that there seems to be no room for any doubt about it. It is by no means certain that Gray's own contemporaries would have thought the matter equally clear. We suspect that to many people in his day it must have seemed a daring novelty to draw illustrations from English history, especially from parts of English his- tory which, it must be remembered, were then a great deal more recent than they are now. To be sure, in choosing English illustrations, a poet of Gray's time was in rather a hard strait. If he chose illustrations from the century or two before his own time, he could only choose names which had hardly got free from the strife of recent politics. If, in a poem of the nature of the Elegy, he had drawn illustrations from earlier times of English history, he would have found but few people in his day likely to understand him. . . . " The change which Gray made in this well-known stanza is not only an improvement in a particular poem, it is a sign of a general improvement in taste. He wrote first ac- cording to the vicious taste of an earlier time, and he then changed it according to his own better taste. And of that better taste he was undoubtedly a prophet to others. Gray's poetry must have done a great deal to open men's eyes to' the fact that they were Englishmen, and that on them, as Englishmen, English things had a higher claim than Roman, and that to them English examples ought to be more speaking than Roman ones. But there is -another side of the case not to be forgotten. Those who would have re- gretted the change from Cato, Tully, and Caesar to Hampden, Milton, and Cromwell, those who perhaps really did think that the bringing in of Hampden, Milton, and Crom- - well was a degradation of what they would have called the Muse, were certainly not those who had the truest knowledge of Cato, Tully, and Caesar. The ' classic' taste from which Gray helped to deliver us was a taste which hardly deserves to be called a taste. Par- donable perhaps in the first heat of the Renaissance, when 'classic' studies and objects had the charm of novelty, it had become by his day a mere silly fashion." 8o NOTES. The first line is indistinct, owing (as the photograph shows) to the wear in folding the sheet, and the pronoun after "Cato" is illegible. The Fraser reprint reads as above. The 13th stanza (present numbering) has "Chill Penury had damped?* with "depress'd" and "repressM" written above. The 17th stanza has "Their Fate" with "Lot" above; and "Their s t ru gg'I*"g Virtues," with "growing" above. The 1 8th stanza has "And at the Shrine," with "crown" above "at the." The next line begins with " Burn," which is crossed out and "With" written above; and it has "hallow'd in the Muse's Flame," with "by" written above "in," and "kindled at" wider "hallow'd in." After this stanza, the MS. has the following four stanzas, which have a line drawn beside them, indicating that they are to be omitted : "The thoughtless World to Majesty may bow Exalt the brave, & idolize Success But more to Innocence their Safety owe Than Power & Genius e'er conspir'd to bless And thou, who mindful of the unhonour'd Dead Dost in these Notes their artless Tale relate By Night & lonely Contemplation led To linger in the gloomy Walks of Fate Hark how the sacred Calm, that broods around Bids ev'ry fierce tumultuous Passion cease In still small Accents whisp'ring from the Ground A grateful Earnest of eternal Peace No more with Reason & thyself at Strife Give anxious Cares & endless Wishes room But thro the cool sequester'd Vale of Life Pursue the silent Tenour of thy Doom." The second of these stanzas has been remodelled and used as the 24th of the present version. Mason thought that there was a pathetic melan- choly in all four which claimed preservation. The third he considered equal to any in the whole Elegy. The poem was originally intended to end here, the introduction of " the hoary-headed swain " being a happy after-thought. In the 19th stanza, the MS. has 'never knew to stray;" and "noise- less" is written over "silent." In the 2 1 st stanza, " Fame, & Epitaph" etc. In the 23d stanza, the last line reads, " And buried Ashes glow with social Fires." After this stanza the MS. has " For Thee, who mindful &c. : as above," indicating that the stanza is to be transposed to this point. The 24th stanza reads, "If chance that e'er some pensive Spirit more, By sympathetic Musings here delay'd, With vain, tho' kind, Enquiry shall explore Thy once-loved Haunt, this long-deserted Shade." The first line of the 25th stanza has "shall say;" and the last two lines r&?ad » "With hasty Footsteps brush the Dews away On the high Brow of yonder hanging Lawn." ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. %% Then comes the following stanza, afterwards omitted : "Him have we seen the Green-wood Side along, While o'er the Heath we hied, our Labours done, Oft as the Woodlark piped her farewell Song With whistful Eyes pursue the setting Sun." Mason remarked : " I rather wonder that he rejected this stanza, as it not only has the same sort of Doric delicacy which charms us peculiarly in this part of the poem, but also completes the account of his whole day; whereas, this evening scene being omitted, we have only his morning walk, and his noontide repose:" The first line of the 26th stanza is " Oft at the Foot of yonder hoary Beech," with "spreading" and "nodding" written above. The first line of the 27th stanza reads, " With Gestures quaint now smileing as in Scorn." The next line has " wayward fancies " written above "fond Conceits," and both "loved" (crossed out) and "would he" above " wont to," which is crossed out. The next line was at first " Now woeful wan, he droop'd, as one forlorn;" but "he droop'd" is crossed out, and "drooping" is written above "woeful." The first line of the 28th stanza has "we miss'd him," and the first syllable of "accustomd" is crossed out. The second line was at first " By the Heath-side, & at his fav'rite Tree ;" but "side " is crossed out, "Along the" written above "By the," and "near" above "at." In the last line "by" is written above "at." In the 29th stanza, the first line has "Dirges meet;" the second line has "by" above "thro;" and the last, originally "Wrote on the Stone beneath that ancient Thorn," has " Graved " and " carved " above "Wrote" and "yon" above "that." After the 29th stanza, and before the Epitaph, the MS. has the follow- ing omitted stanza : "There scatter 1 d oft the earliest of y e Year By Hands unseen are frequent Vi'lets found The Robin loves to build & warble there And little Footsteps lightly print the Ground." "Year" is written above an erased "Spring;" the second line has "Showers of" above "frequent;" and the third line has "Redbreast" above "Robin." This stanza, with these verbal changes, is appended to the Pembroke MS. (it is not in the Egerton MS.), and was printed in all the editions up to 1753- I* was tnen dropped because Gray considered it too long a pa- renthesis in this place. The part was sacrificed for the good of the whole. The first line of the 31st stanza has " his Heart sincere ;" and the last two lines read thus : " He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a Tear. He gained from Heav'n ; 'twas all he wish'd, a Friend." The 32d and last stanza is as follows : " No farther seek his Merits to disclose, Nor seek to draw them from their dread Abode (His Frailties there in trembling Hope repose) The Bosom of his Father & his God. " In the second line "think" is written above "seek." F 82 NOTES. The Pembroke MS. has the following variations from the ordinary version : In the 2d stanza, " Or drowsy," etc. 5th stanza, "and [&] the ecchoing Horn.'* 6th stanza, " Nor climb his Knees." The 10th stanza begins, "Forgive, ye Proud, th? involuntary Fault If Memory to These" etc., the present readings ("Nor you," "impute to These the," and "Memory o'er their tomb") being inserted in the margin. The 12th stanza has "Reins of Empire," with "Rod" in the margin. In the 15th stanza, the word "Lands" has been crossed out, and " Fields " written above it. The 17th has " Or shut the Gates," etc. In the 2 1st we have " Fame & Epitaph supply." The 23d has "And in our Ashes glow" the readings " Ev'n " and "live" being inserted in the margin. The 27th stanza has "would he rove." In the 28th stanza, the first line reads "from the custom'd Hill." In the 29th, a word which we cannot make out has been erased, and " aged " substituted. Before the Epitaph, two asterisks refer to the bottom of the page, where the stanza beginning "There scatter' d oft" (see p. 81 above) is given in its revised form, with the marginal note, " Omitted in 1753." The last two lines of the 31st stanza (see note on p. 93 below) are pointed as follows : "He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a Tear, He gain'd from Heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a Friend." Some of the peculiarities of spelling in this MS. are the following : "Curfeu;" "Plowman;" "Tinkleings;" "mopeing;" "ecchoing;" "Hus- wife;" "He" (aisle); "wast" (waste); " village-Hambden;" "Rhimes;" "spell't;" "chearful;" "born" (borne); etc. The Egerton MS. has the following variations : in 2d stanza, " Or drow- sy;" in 5th, "and the ecchoing;" in 6th, "Nor climb;" in 7th, " Sickles;" in ioth, " Forgive y ye Proud," etc., as in Fraser MS. ; in 12th, "Reins of Empire ;" in 17th, " Or shut ;" in 18th, " Shrines ;" in 23d, " And in our Ashes glow ;" and in 27th, "would he rove." Several localities have contended for the honor of being the scene of the Elegy, but the general sentiment has always, and justly, been in favor of Stoke-Pogis. It was there that Gray began the poem in 1742 ; and there, as we have seen, he finished it in 1750. In that churchyard his mother was buried, and there, at his request, his own remains were after- wards laid beside her. The scene is, moreover, in all respects in perfect keeping with the spirit of the poem. According to the common Cambridge tradition, Granchester, a parish about two miles southwest of the University, to which Gray was in the habit of taking his "constitutional" daily, is the locality of the poem; and the great bell of St. Mary's is the " curfew " of the first stanza. Another tradition makes a similar claim for Madingley, some three miles and a ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. 83 half northwest of Cambridge. Both places have churchyards such as the Elegy describes ; and this is about all that can be said in favor of their pretensions. There is also a parish called Burnham Beeches, in Buck- inghamshire, which one writer at least has suggested as the scene of the poem ; but the spot, though familiar to Gray, was not hallowed to him by the fond and tender associations that gathered about Stoke. 1. The curfew. Hales remarks: "It is a great mistake to suppose that the ringing of the curfew was, at its institution, a mark of Norman oppression. If such a custom was unknown before the Conquest, it only shows that the old English police was less well-regulated than that of many parts of the Continent, and how much the superior civilization of the Norman-French was needed. Fires were the curse of the timber-built towns of the Middle Ages: ' Solae pestes Londoniae sunt stultorum im- modica potatio &l frequens incendium? (Fitzstephen). The enforced ex- tinction of domestic lights at an appointed signal was designed to be a safeguard against them." Warton wanted to have this line read "The curfew tolls !— the knell ot parting day." But the MSS.show that Gray did not write it so, and the change introduces a discord into the very first bar of the rhythmic movement of the poem. Mitford says that toll is " not the appropriate verb," as the curfew was rung, not tolled. We presume that depended, to some extent, on the fancy of the ringer. Milton (77 Pens. 76) speaks of the curfew as "Swinging slow with sullen roar." Gray himself quotes here Dante, Purgat. 8 : — "squilla di lontano Che paia '1 giorno pianger, che si muore ;" and we cannot refrain from adding, for the benefit of those unfamiliar with Italian, Longfellow's exquisite translation : — "from far away a bell That seemeth to deplore the dying day." Mitford quotes (incorrectly, as often) Dryden, Prol. to Troilus and Cres- sida, 22 : "That tolls the knell for their departed sense." On parting— departing, cf. Shakes. Cor. v. 6 : " When I parted hence ;" Goldsmith, D. V. 171 : "Beside the bed where parting life was laid," etc. 2. The lowing herd ivind, etc. Wind, not winds, is the reading of all the MSS. (see fac-simile of this stanza on p. 73) and of all the early edi- tions — that of 1768, Mason's, Wakefield's, Mathias's, etc. — but wp find no note of the fact in Mitford's or any other of the more recent editions, which have substituted winds. Whether the change was made as an amendment or accidentally, we do not know;* but the original reading * Very likely the latter, as we have seen that winds appears in the unauthorized ver- sion of the London Magazine (March, 1751), where it maybe a misprint, like the others noted above. 84 NOTES. seems to us by far the better one. The poet does not refer to the herd as an aggregate, but to the animals that compose it. He sees, not it, but "them on their winding way." The ordinary reading mars both the meaning and the melody of the line. 3. The critic of the N. A. Review points out that this line "is quite pe- culiar in its possible transformations. We have made," he adds, "twenty different versions preserving the rhythm, the general sentiment, and the rhyming word. Any one of these variations might be, not inappropri- ately, substituted for the original reading." Luke quotes Spenser, F. Q. vi. 7, 39 : " And now she was uppon the weary way." 6. Air is of course the object, not the subject of the verb. 7. Save where the beetle, etc. Cf. Collins, Ode to Evening* "Now air is hush'd, save where the weak-eyed bat With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds His small but sullen horn, As oft he rises 'midst the twilight path, Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum." and Macbeth, iii. 2 : " Ere the bat hath flown His cloister'd flight; ere to black Hecate's summons The shard-borne beetle, with his drowsy hums, Hath rung night's yawning peal," etc. 10. The moping owl. Mitford quotes Ovid, Met. v. 550 : " Ignavus bubo, dirum mortalibus omen;" Thomson, Winter, 114: "Assicfuous in his bower the wailing owl Plies his sad song ;" and Mallet, Excursion : "the wailing owl Screams solitary to the mournful moon." 12. Her ancient solitary reign. Cf. Virgil, Geo. iii. 476: "desertaque regna pastorum." 13. " As he stands in the churchyard, he thinks only of the poorer people, because the better-to-do lay interred inside the church. Tenny- son {In Mem. x.) speaks of resting We may remark here that the edition of 1768 — the editio firincefis of the collected Poems — was issued under Gray's own supervision, and is printed with remarkable accu- racy. < We have detected only one indubitable error of the type in the entire volume. Certain peculiarities of spelling were probably intentional, as we find the like in the fac- similes of the poet's manuscripts. The many quotations from Greek, Latin, and Italian are correctly given (according to the received texts of the time), and the references to au- thorities, so far as we have verified them, are equally exact. The book throughout bears the marks of Gray's scholarly and critical habits, and we may be sure that the poems appear in precisely the form which he meant they should retain. In doubtful cases, therefore, we have generally followed this edition. Mason's (the second edition : York, 1778) is also carefully edited and printed, and its readings seldom vary from Gray's. All of Mitford' s that we have examined swarm with errors, especially in the notes. Picker- ing's (1835), edited by Mitford, is perhaps the worst of all. The Boston ed. (Little, Brown, & Co., 1853) is a pretty careful reproduction of Pickering's, with all its inaccuracies. Gosse's (1884), with all its merits, is inaccurate in its collation of the MSS. of the Elegy. ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. 85 'beneath the clover sod That takes the sunshine and the rains, Or where the kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of God.' In Gray's time, and long before, and some time after it, the former resting-place was for the poor, the latter for the rich. It was so in the first instance, for two reasons : (i.) the interior of the church was regarded as of great sanctity, and all who could sought a place in it, the most dearly coveted spot being near the high altar ; (ii.) when elaborate tombs were the fashion, they were built inside the church for the sake of security, ' 2av tombs ' being liable to be ' robb'd ' (see the funeral dirge in Webster's White Devil). As these two considerations gradually ceased to have power, and other considerations of an opposite tendency began to prevail, the in- side of the church became comparatively deserted, except when ancestral reasons gave no choice" (Hales). 17. Cf. Milton, Arcades, 56: "the odorous breath of morn;" P. L. ix. 192: " Now when as sacred light began to dawn In Eden on the humid flowers that breath'd Their morning incense," etc. 18. Hesiod (Ejoy. 568) calls the swallow opSoyorj x&i$**>v. Cf. Virgil, sEn. viii. 455 : " Evandrum ex humili tecto lux suscitat alma, Et matutini volucrum suD culmine cantus." 19. The cock's shrill clarion. Cf. Philips, Cyder, i. 753 : "When chanticleer with clarion shrill recalls The tardy day ;" Milton, P. L. vii. 443 : "The crested cock, whose clarion sounds The silent hours ;" Hamlet, i. I : "The cock that is the trumpet to the morn;" Quarles, Argalus and Parthenia : " I slept not till the early bugle-horn Of chaunticlere had summon' d in the morn;" and Thomas Kyd, England's Parnassus : " The cheerful cock, the sad night's trumpeter, Wayting upon the rising of the sunne : The wandering swallow with her broken song," etc. 20. Their lowly bed. Wakefield remarks : " Some readers, keeping in mind the ' narrow 7 cell ' above, have mistaken the ' lowly bed ' in this verse for the grave — a most puerile and ridiculous blunder ;" and Mit- ford says: "Here the epithet 'lowly,' as applied to 'bed,' occasions some ambiguity as to whether the poet meant the bed on which they sleep, or the grave in which they are laid, which in poetry is called a 'lowly bed.' Of course the former is designed; but Mr. Lloyd, in his Latin translation, mistook it for the latter." 86 NOTES. 21. Cf. Lucretius, iii. 894 : Jam jam non domus accipiet te laeta, neque uxor Optima nee dulces occurrent oscula nati Praeripere et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent ;" and Horace, Epod. ii. 39 : "Quod si pudica mulier in partem juvet Domum atque dulces liberos Sacrum vetustis exstruat lignis focum Lassi sub adventum viri," etc. Mitford quotes Thomson, Winter, 311 : " In vain for him the officious wife prepares The fire fair-blazing, and the vestment warm ; In. vain his little children, peeping out Into the mingling storm, demand their sire With tears ot artless innocence." Wakefield cites The Idler, 103 : " There are few things, not purely evil, of which we can say without some emotion of uneasiness, this is the last." 22. Ply her evening care. Mitford says, " To ply a care is an expres- sion that is not proper to our language, and was probably formed for the rhyme share." Hales remarks: "This is probably the kind of phrase which led Wordsworth to pronounce the language of the Elegy unin- telligible. Compare his own ' And she I cherished turned her wheel Beside an English fire.' " 23. No. children run, etc. Hales quotes Burns, Cotter's Saturday Night, 21 : "Th' expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher through To meet their Dad, wi' flichterin noise an' glee." 24. Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share. Wakefield compares Vir- gil, Geo. ii. 523 : "Interea dulces pendent circum oscula nati;" and Mitford adds from Dryden, "Whose little arms about thy legs are cast, And climbing for a kiss prevent their mother's haste." Cf. Thomson, Liberty, iii. 171 : "His little children climbing for a kiss." 26. The stubborn glebe. Cf. Gay, Fables, ii. 15 : "Tis mine to tame the stubborn glebe." Broke- broken, as often in poetry, especially in the Elizabethan writers. See Abbott, Shakes. Gr. 343. 27. Drive their team afield. Cf. Lycidas, 27 : " We drove afield ;" and Dryden, Virgil's Ed. ii. 38 : " With me to drive afield." 28. Their sturdy stroke. Cf. Spenser, Shep. Kal. Feb. : "But to the roote bent his sturdy stroa^e, And made many wounds in the wast [wasted] Oake;" 87 ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD and Dryden, Geo. iii. 639 : "Labour him with many a sturdy stroke." 30. As Mitford remarks, obscure and poor make " a very imperfect rhyme ;" and the same might be said of toil and smile. 33. Mitford suggests that Gray had in mind these verses from his friend West's Monody on Queen Caroline: "Ah, me! what boots us all our boasted power, Our golden treasure, and our purple state ; They cannot ward the inevitable hour, Nor stay the fearful violence of fate." Hurd compares Cowley : " Beauty, and strength, and wit, and wealth, and power, Have their short flourishing hour ; And love to see themselves, and smile, And joy in their pre-eminence a while: Even so in the same land Poor weeds, rich com, gay flowers together stand ; Alas! Death mows down all with an impartial hand." 35. Awaits. The reading of the ed. of 1768, as of all three MSS. Hour is the subject, not the object, of the verb. 36. Hayley, in the Life of Crashaw, Biographia Britannica, says that this line is " literally translated from the Latin prose of Bartholinus in his Danish Antiquities." 39. Fretted. The fret is, strictly, an ornament used in classical archi- tecture, formed by small fillets intersecting each other at right angles. Parker [Glossary of Architecture) derives the word from the Latin f return, a strait ; and Hales from ferrztm, iron, through the Italian f "errata, an iron grating. It is more likely (see Stratmann and Wb.) from the A. S.frcetu, an ornament. Cf. Hamlet, ii. 2 : " This majestical roof fretted with golden fire ;" and Cymbeline, ii. 4 : "The roof o' the chamber With golden cherubins is fretted." 40. The pealing anthem. Cf. II Penseroso, 161 : "There let the pealing organ blow To the full-voiced quire below, In service high, and anthem clear," etc. 41. Storied urn. Cf. II Pens. 159 : " storied windows richly dight." On animated bust, cf. Pope, Temple of Fame, 73 : "Heroes in animated mar- ble frown ;" and Virgil, ALn. vi. 847 : "spirantia aera." 43. Provoke. Mitford considers this use of the word "unusually bold, to say the least." It is simply the etymological meaning,/*? call forth (Latin, provocare). See Wb. Cf. Pope, Ode: "But when our country's cause provokes to arms." 44. Dull cold ear. Cf. Shakes. Hen. VIII. iii. 2 : " And sleep in dull, cold marble," 88 NOTES. 46. Pregnant with celestial fire. This phrase has been copied by Cowper in his Boadicea, which is said (see notes of "Globe" ed.) to have been written after reading Hume's History, in 1780 : "Such the bard's prophetic words, Pregnant with celestial fire, Bending as he swept the chords Of his sweet but awful lyre." 47. Mitford quotes Ovid, Ep. v. 86 : "Sunt mihi quas possint sceptra decere manus." 48. Living lyre. Cf. Cowley: " Begin the song, and strike the living lyre ;" and Pope, Windsor Forest, 281 : "Who now shall charm the shades where Cowley strung His living harp, and lofty Denham sung?" 50. Cf. Browne, Religio Medici: " Rich with the spoils of nature." 51. "Rage is often used in the post-Elizabethan writers of the 17th century, and in the 18th century writers, for inspiration, enthusiasm" (Hales). Cf. Cowley : "Who brought green poesy to her perfect age, And made that art which was a rage?" and Tickell, Prol. : "How hard the task! How rare the godlike rage!" Cf. also the use of the Latin rabies for the "divine afflatus," as in ALneid, vi. 49. 53. Full many a gem, etc. Cf. Bishop Hall, Contemplations: "There is many a rich stone laid up in the bowells of the earth, many a fair pearle in the bosome of the sea, that never was seene, nor never shall bee." Purest ray serene. As Hales remarks, this is a favourite arrangement of epithets with Milton. Cf. Hymn on Nativity : " flower-inwoven tresses torn ;" Comus: "beckoning shadows dire ;" "every alley green," etc. ; L Allegro : " native wood-notes wild ;" Lycidas : " sad occasion dear;" "blest kingdoms meek," etc. 55. Full many a flower, etc. Cf. Pope, Rape of the Lock, iv. 158 : "Like roses that in deserts bloom and die." Mitford cites Chamberlayne, Pharonida, ii. 4 : " Like beauteous flowers which vainly waste their scent Of odours in unhaunted deserts;" and Young, Univ. Pass. sat. v. : " In distant wilds, by human eyes unseen, She rears her flowers, and spreads her velvet green ; Pure gurgling rills the lonely desert trace, And waste their music on the savage race ;' ' and Philip, Thule : ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. 89 "Like wood And waste Hales quotes Waller's "Like woodland flowers, which paint the desert glades, And waste their sweets in unfrequented shades." " Go, lovely rose, Tell her that's young And shuns to have her graces spied, That hadst thou sprung In deserts where no men abide Thou must have uncommended died." On desert air, cf. Macbeth, iv. 3 : " That would be howl'd out in the desert air." 57. It was in 1636 that John Hampden, of Buckinghamshire (a cousin of Oliver Cromwell), refused to pay the ship-money tax which Charles I. was levying without the authority of Parliament. 58. Little tyrant. Cf. Thomson, Winter : "With open freedom little tyrants raged." The artists who have illustrated this passage (see, for instance, Favourite English Poems, p. 305, and Harper's Monthly, vol. vii. p. 3) appear to un- derstand "little" as equivalent to juvenile. If that had been the mean- ing, the poet would have used some other phrase than " of his fields," or " his lands," as he first wrote it. 59. Some mute inglorious Milton. Cf. Phillips, preface to Theatrum Poetarum : " Even the very names of some who having perhaps been comparable to Homer for heroic poesy, or to Euripides for tragedy, yet nevertheless sleep inglorious in the crowd of the forgotten vulgar." 60. Some Cromwell, etc. Hales remarks : " The prejudice against Cromwell was extremely strong throughout the 18th century, even amongst the more liberal-minded. That cloud of ' detractions rude,' of which Milton speaks in his noble sonnet to our ' chief of men ' as in his own day enveloping the great republican leader, still lay thick and heavy over him. His wise statesmanship, his unceasing earnestness, his high-minded purpose, were not yet seen." After this stanza Thomas Edwards, the author of the Canons of Crit- icism, would add the following, to supply what he deemed a defect in the poem : " Some lovely fair, whose unaffected charms Shone with attraction to herself alone ; Whose beauty might have bless' d a monarch's arms, Whose virtue cast a lustre on a throne. "That humble beauty warm'd an honest heart, And cheer' d the labours of a faithful spouse; That virtue form'd for every decent part The healthful offspring that adorn'd their house." Edwards was an able critic, but it is evident that he was no poet 63. Mitford quotes Tickell : "To scatter blessings o'er the British land;" and Mrs. Behn : "Is scattering plenty over all the land." 66. Their growing virtues. That is, the growth of their virtues. 9° NOTES. 67. To wade through slaughter, etc. Cf. Pope, Temp, of Fame, 347 : "And swam to empire through the purple flood." 68. Cf. Shakes. Hen. V. iii. 3 : "The gates of mercy shall be all shut up." 70. To quench the blushes, etc. Cf. Shakes. W. T. iv. 3 : "Come, quench your blushes, and present yourself" 73. Far from the madding crowd's, etc. Rogers quotes Drummond : "Far from the madding worldling's hoarse discords." Mitford points out "the ambiguity of this couplet, which indeed gives a sense exactly contrary to that intended ; to avoid which one must break the grammatical construction." The poet's meaning is, however, clear enough. 75. Wakefield quotes Pope, Epitaph on Fenton : " Foe to loud praise, and friend to learned ease, Content with science in the vale of peace." 77. These bones. " The bones of these. So is is often used in Latin, especially by Livy, as in v. 22": ' Ea sola pecunia,' the money derived from that sale, etc." (Hales). Still in 78 = always, uniformly. 84. That teach. Mitford censures teach as ungrammatical ; but it may be justified as a " construction according to sense." 85. Hales remarks: "At the first glance it might seem that to dumb Forgetfulness a prey was in apposition to who, and the meaning was, 'Who that now lies forgotten,' etc. ; in which case the second line of the stanza must be closely connected with the fourth ; for the question of the passage is not ' Who ever died ?' but ' Who ever died without wishing to be remem- bered?' But in this way of interpreting this difficult stanza (i.) there is comparatively little force in the appositional phrase, and (ii.) there is a certain awkwardness in deferring so long the clause (virtually adverbal though apparently coordinate) in which, as has just been noticed, the point of the question really lies. Perhaps therefore it is better to take the phrase to dumb Forgetfulness a prey as in fact the completion of the predicate resigned, and interpret thus : Who ever resigned this life of his with all its pleasures and all its pains to be utterly ignored and forgot- ten ?= who ever, when resigning it, reconciled himself to its being for- gotten ? In this case the second half of the stanza echoes the thought of the first half." We give the note in full, and leave the reader to take his choice of the two interpretations. For ourself, we incline to the first rather than the second. We prefer to take to dumb Forgetfulness a prey as appositional and proleptic, and not as the grammatical complement of resigned: Who, yielding himself up a prey to dumb Forgetfulness, ever resigned this life without casting a longing, lingering look behind ? 90. Pious is used in the sense of the Latin plus. Ovid has "piae lacri- mae." Mitford quotes Pope, Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady, 49 : "No friend's complaint, no kind domestic tear Pleas' d thy pale ghost, or grac'd thy mournful bier; By foreign hands thy dying eyes were clos'd" ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. 91 " In this stanza," says Hales, " he answers in an exquisite manner the two questions, or rather the one question twice repeated, of the preceding stanza. . . . What he would say is that every one while a spark of life yet remains in him yearns for some kindly loving remembrance ; nay, even after the spark is quenched, even when all is dust and ashes, that yearning must still be felt." 91, 92. Mitford paraphrases the couplet thus: "The voice of Nature still cries from the tomb in the language of the epitaph inscribed upon it, which still endeavours to connect us with the living ; the fires of former affection are still alive beneath our ashes." Cf. Chaucer, C. T. 3880 : " Yet in our ashen cold is fire yreken." Gray himself quotes Petrarch, Sonnet 169 : "Ch'i veggio nel pensier, dolce mio fuoco, Fredda una lingua e due begli occhi chiusi, Rimaner doppo noi pien di faville," translated by Nott as follows : "These, my sweet fair, so warns prophetic thought, Clos'd thy bright eye, and mute thy poet's tongue, E'en after death shall still with sparks be fraught," the "these" meaning his love and his songs concerning it. Gray trans- lated this sonnet into Latin elegiacs, the last line being rendered, "Ardebitque urna multa favilla mea." 93. For the original form of this stanza (in the Fraser MS.) see p. 80 above. 95. Chance is virtually an adverb here = perchance. 98. The peep of dawn. Mitford quotes Comns, 138: "Ere the blabbing eastern scout, The nice morn, on the Indian steep From her cabin' d loop-hole peep." "though from off the boughs each morn We brush mellifluous dews :" 99. Cf. Milton, P. L. v. 428 : \* and Arcades, 50 : "And from the boughs brush off the evil dew." Wakefield quotes Thomson, Spring, 103 : "Oft let me wander o'er the dewy fields, Where freshness breathes, and dash the trembling drops From the bent brush, as through the verdant maze Of sweetbrier hedges I pursue my walk." IOO. Upland lawn. Cf. Milton, Lycidas, 25 : 1 ' Ere the high lawns appeal d Under the opening eyelids of the mom." In V Allegro, 92, we have "upland hamlets," where Hales thinks "up- land = country, as opposed to town." He adds, " Gray in his Elegy seems 92 NOTES. to use the Word loosely for ' on the higher ground ;' perhaps he took it from Milton, without quite understanding in what sense Milton uses it." We doubt whether Hales understands Milton here. It is true that up- land used to mean country, as uplanders meant countrymen, and upland- ish countrified (see Nares and Wb.), but the other meaning is older than Milton (see Halliwell's Diet of Archaic Words), and Johnson, Keightley, and others are probably right in considering " upland hamlets " an in- stance of it. Masson, in his recent edition of Milton (1875), explains the " upland hamlets " as " little villages among the slopes, away from the river-meadows and the hay-making." 101. As Mitford remarks, beech and stretch form an imperfect rhyme. 102. Luke quotes Spenser, Ruines of Rome, st. 28 : "Shewing her wreathed rootes and naked armes." 103. His listless length. Hales compares King Lear, i. 4 : "If you will measure your lubber's length again, tarry." Cf. also Brittaiifs Ida (for- merly ascribed to Spenser, but rejected by the best editors), iii. 2 : "Her goodly length stretcht on a lilly-bed." 104. Cf. Thomson, Spring, 644 : " divided by a babbling brook ;" and Horace, Od. iii. 13, 15 : "unde loquaces Lymphae desiliunt tuae." Wakefield quotes As You Like It, ii. 1 : "as he lay along Under an oak whose antique root peeps out Upon the brook that brawls along this road." 105. Smiling as in scorn. Cf. Shakes. Pass. Pilg?-im, 14 : " Yet at my parting sweetly did she smile, In scorn or friendship, nill I construe whether." and Skelton, ProL to B. of C. : " Smylynge half in scorne At our foly." 107. Woeful-wan. Mitford says : " Woeful-wan is not a legitimate compound, and must be divided into two separate words, for such they are, when released from the handcuffs of the hyphen." The hyphen is not in the edition of 1768, and we should omit it if it were not found in the Pembroke MS. • Wakefield quotes Spenser, Shep. Kal. Jan. : "For pale and wanne he was (alas the while!) May seeme he lovd, or els some care he tooke." 108. " Hopeless is here used in a proleptic or anticipatory way " (Hales). 109. Customed is Gray's word, not 'customed, as usually printed. See either Wb. or Wore. s. v. Cf. Milton, Ep. Damonis : " Simul assueta seditque sub ulmo." 114. Churchway path. Cf. Shakes. M. IV. D. v. 2 : ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD. 93 "Now it is the time of night, That the graves all gaping wide, Every one lets forth his sprite In the churchway paths to glide." 115. For thou canst read. The " hoary-headed swain" of course could not read. 116. Graved. The old form of the participle is graven, but graved is also in good use. The old preterite grove is obsolete. 117. The lap of earth. Cf. Spenser, F. Q. v. 7, 9 : " For other beds the Priests there used none, But on their mother Earths deare lap did lie ;' ' and Milton, P. L. x. 777 : "How glad would lay me down, As in my mother's lap!" Lucretius (i. 291) has "gremium matris terrai." Mitford adds the pa- thetic sentence of Pliny, Hist. Nat. ii. 63 : " Nam terra novissime com- plexa gremio jam a reliqua natura abnegatos, turn maxime, ut mater, operit." 123. He gave to misery all he had, a tear. This is the pointing of the line in the MSS. and in all the early editions except that of Mathias, who seems to be responsible for the change (adopted by the recent editors, almost without exception) to, "He gave to Misery (all he had) a tear." This alters the meaning, mars the rhythm, and spoils the sentiment. If one does not see the difference at once, it would be useless to try to make him see it. Mitford, who ought to have known better, not only thrusts in the parenthesis, but quotes this from Pope's Homer as an illus- tration of it : "His fame ('tis all the dead can have) shall live." 126. Mitford says that Or in this line should be Nor. Yes, if "draw" is an imperative, like " seek ;" no, if it is an infinitive, in the same con- struction as "to disclose." That the latter was the construction the poet had in mind is evident from the first form of the stanza in the Fraser MS., where "seek" is repeated: "No farther seek his Merits to disclose, Nor seek to draw them from their dread Abode." 127. In trembling hope. Gray quotes Petrarch, Sonnet 104: "paven- tosa speme." Cf. Lucan, Fharsalia, vii. 297: " Spe trepiuo ;" Mallet, Funeral Hymn, 473 : "With trembling tenderness of hope and fear;" and Beaumont, Psyche, xv. 314 : "Divided here twixt trembling hope and fear." Hooker {Eccl. Pol. i.) defines hope as " a trembling expectation of things far removed." ODE ON THE SPRING. The original manuscript title of this ode was " Noontide." It was first printed in Dodsley's Collection, vol. ii. p. 271, under the title of " Ode." 1. The rosy-bosom' d Hours. Cf. Milton, Comus, 984 : " The Graces and the rosy-bosom'd Hours ;" and Thomson, Sftri7ig, 1007 : ''The rosy-bosom'd Spring To weeping Fancy pines." The Horce, or hours, according to the Homeric idea, were the goddesses of the seasons, the course of which was symbolically represented by " the dance of the Hours." They were often described, in connection with the Graces, Hebe, and Aphrodite, as accompanying with their dancing the ODE ON THE SPRING. 95 songs of the Muses and the lyre of Apollo. Long after the time of Homer they continued to be regarded as the givers of the seasons, especially spring and autumn, or " Nature in her bloom and her maturity." At first there were only two Horae, Thallo (or Spring) and Karpo (or Autumn) ; but later the number was three, like that of the Graces. In art they are represented as blooming maidens, bearing the products of the seasons. 2. Fair Venus" train. The Hours adorned Aphrodite (Venus) as she rose from the sea, and are often associated with her by Homer, Hesiod, and other classical writers. Wakefield remarks : " Venus is here em- ployed, in conformity to the mythology of the Greeks, as the source of creation and beauty." 3. Long-expecting. Waiting long for the spring. Sometimes incor- rectly printed "long-expected." Cf. Dryden, Astrcea Redux, 132: "To flowers that in its womb expecting lie." 4. The purple year. Cf. the Pervigilium Veneris, 13 : " Ipsa gemmis purpurantem pingit annum floribus ;" Pope, Pastorals, i. 28 : "And lavish Nature paints the purple year;" and Mallet, Zephyr: " Gales that wake the purple year." 5. The Attic warbler. The nightingale, called "the Attic bird," either because it was so common in Attica, or from the old legend that Philo- mela (or, as some say, Procne), the daughter of a king of Attica, was changed into a nightingale. Cf. Milton's description of Athens (P. R. iv. 245) : "where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long." Cf. Ovid, Hal. no: "Attica avis verna sub tempestate queratus ;" and Propertius, ii. 16, 6 : "Attica volucris." Pours her throat is a metonymy. H. p. 85. Cf. Pope, Essay on Man. iii. 33 : " Is it for thee the linnet pours her throat ?" 6. 7. Cf. Thomson, Spi-ing, 577 : " From the first note the hollow cuckoo sings, The symphony of spring." 9, 10. Cf. Milton, Comus, 989 : " And west winds with musky wing About the cedarn alleys fling Nard and cassia's balmy smells." 12. Cf. Milton, P. L. iv. 245 : " Where the unpierc'd shade Imbrown'd the noontide bowers;" Pope, Eloisa, 170 : "And breathes a browner horror on the woods ;" Thomson, Castle of Indolence, i. 38: "Or Au- tumn's varied shades imbrown the walls." According to Ruskin (Modern Painters, vol. iii. p. 241, Amer. ed.) there is no brown in nature. After remarking that Dante " does not acknowl- edge the existence of the colour of brown at all," he goes on to say: " But one day, just when I was puzzling myself about this, I happened to be sitting by one of our best living modern colourists, watching him at his work, when he said, suddenly and by mere accident, after we had been talking about other things, * Do you know I have found that there is no brown in nature? What we call brown is always a variety either of 96 N01ES. orange or purple. It never can be represented by umber, unless altered by contrast.' It is curious how far the significance of this remark extends, how exquisitely it illustrates and confirms the mediaeval sense of hue," etc. 13. O'ercanopies the glade. Gray himself quotes Shakes. M. N. D. ii. 1 : " A bank o'ercanopied with luscious woodbine."* Cf. Fletcher, Purple Island, i. 5, 30 : " The beech shall yield a cool, safe canopy ;" and Milton, Comus, 543 : "a bank, With ivy canopied." 15. Rushy brink. Cf. Comus, 890 : " By the rushy-fringed bank." 19, 20. These lines, as first printed, read : "How low, how indigent the proud! How little are the great!" 22. The panting herds. Cf. Pope, Past. ii. 87 : " To closer shades the panting flocks remove." 23. The peopled air. Cf. Walton, C. A. : " Now the wing'd people of the sky shall sing;" Beaumont, Psyche: "Every tree empeopled was with birds of softest throats." 24. The busy murmur. Cf. Milton, P. R. iv. 248 : " bees' industrious murmur." 25. The insect youth. Perhaps suggested by a line in Green's Hermit- age, quoted in a letter of Gray to Walpole : " From maggot-youth through change of state," etc. See on 31 below. 26. The ho?iied spring. Cf. Milton, 77 Pens. 142 : "the bee with honied thigh ;" and Lye. 140 : "the honied showers." " There has of late arisen," says Johnson in his Life of Gray, "a prac- tice of giving to adjectives derived from substantives the termination of participles, such as the cultured plain, the daisied bank ; but I am sorry to see in the lines of a scholar like Gray the honied spring." But, as we have seen, honied is found in Milton ; and Shakespeare also uses it in Hep. V. i. 1 : " honey'd sentences." Mellitus is used by Cicero, Horace, and Catullus. The editor of an English dictionary, as Lord Grenville has remarked, ought to know "that the ready conversion of our sub- stances into verbs, participles, and participial adjectives is of the very essence of our tongue, derived from its Saxon origin, and a main source of its energy and richness." 27. The liquid noon. Gray quotes Virgil, Geo. iv. 59 : " Nare per aesta- tem liquidam." 30. Quick-glancing to the sun. Gray quotes Milton, P. L. vii. 405 : "Sporting with quick glance, Show to the sun their waved coats dropt with gold." 31. Gray here quotes Green, Grotto : " While insects from the threshold * The reading of the folio of 1623 is : " I know a banke where the wilde time blowes, Where Oxslips and the nodding Violet growes, Quite ouer-cannoped with luscious woodbine." Dyce and some other modern editors read, "Quite overcanopied with lush woodbine." ODE ON THE SPRING. gy preach." In a letter to Walpole, he says : " I send you a bit of a thing for two reasons : first, because it is of one of your favourites, Mr. M. Green ; and next, because I would do justice. The thought on which my second Ode turns [this Ode, afterwards placed first by Gray] is mani- festly stole from hence ; not that I knew it at the time, but having seen, this many years before, to be sure it imprinted itself on my memory, and. forgetting the Author, I took it for my own." Then comes the quotation from Green's Grotto. The passage referring to the insects is as follows : "To the mind's ear, and inward sight, There silence speaks, and shade gives light : While insects from the threshold preach, And minds dispos'd to musing teach; Proud of strong limbs and painted hues, They perish by the slightest bruise ; Or maladies begun within Destroy more slow life' s frail machine : From maggot-youth, thro' change of state, They feel like us the turns of fate : Some born to creep have liv'd to fly, And chang'd earth's cells for dwellings high: And some that did their six wings keep, Before they died, been forc'd to creep. They politics, like ours, profess ; The greater prey upon the less. Some strain on foot huge loads to bring, Some toil incessant on the wing: Nor from their vigorous schemes desist Till death ; and then they are never mist. Some frolick, toil, marry, increase, Are sick and well, have war and peace ; And broke with age in half a day, . Yield to successors, and away." 47. Painted plumage. Cf. Pope, Windsor Forest, 118 : "His painted wings ;" and Milton, P. L. vii. 433 : " From branch to branch the smaller birds with song Solaced the woods, and spread their painted wings." See also Virgil, Geo. iii. 243, and ^En. iv. 525 : " pictaeque volucres ;' and Phaedrus, Pad. iii. 18: "pictisque plumis." 9 8 NOTES. ODE ON THE DEATH OF A FAVOURITE CAT. This ode first appeared in Dodsley's Collection, vol. ii. p. 274, with some variations noticed below. Walpole, after the death of Gray, placed the china vase on a pedestal at Strawberry Hill, with a few lines of the ode for an inscription. In a letter to Walpole, dated March 1, 1747, Gray refers to the subject of the ode in the following jocose strain : "As one ought to be particu- larly careful to avoid blunders in a compliment of condolence, it would be a sensible satisfaction to me (before I testify my sorrow, and the sin- cere part I take in your misfortune) to know for certain who it is I lament. I knew Zara and Selima (Selima, was it? or Fatima ?), or rather I knew them both together ; for I cannot justly say which was which. Then as to your handsome Cat, the name you distinguish her by, I am no less at a loss, as well knowing one's handsome cat is always the cat one likes best ; or if one be alive and the other dead, it is usually the latter that is the handsomest. Besides, if the point were never so clear, I hope you do not think me so ill-bred or so imprudent as to forfeit all my interest in the survivor ; oh no ! I would rather seem to mistake, and imagine to be sure it must be the tabby one that had met with this sad accident. Till this affair is a little better determined, you will excuse me if I do not begin to cry, Tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque doloris. "... Heigh ho ! I feel (as you to be sure have done long since) that I have very little to say, at least in prose. Somebody will be the better for it ; I do not mean you, but your Cat, feue Mademoiselle Selime, whom I am about to immortalize for one week or fortnight, as follows : [the Ode follows, which we need not reprint here]. " There's a poem for you, it is rather too long for an Epitaph." 2. Cf. Lady M. W. Montagu, Town Eclogues : " Where the tall jar erects its stately pride, With antic shapes in China's azure dyed." 3. The azure flowers that blow. Johnson and Wakefield find fault with this as redundant, but it is no more so than poetic usage allows. In the Progress of Poesy, i. 1, we have again : " The laughing flowers that round them blow." Cf. Comus, 992 : " Iris there with humid bow Waters the odorous banks that blow Flowers of more mingled hue Than her purfled scarf can shew." ODE ON THE DEATH OF A FAVOURITE CAT. gg 4. Tabby. For the derivation of this word from the French tabis, a kind of silk, see Wb. In the 1st ed. (Dodsley) the 5th line preceded the 4th. 6. The lake. In the mock-heroic vein that runs through the whole poem. 11. Jet. This word comes, through the French, from Gagai, a town in Lycia, where the mineral was first obtained. 14. Two angel forms. The 1st ed. has "two beauteous forms," which Mitford prefers to the present reading, "as the images of angel and genii interfere with each other, and bring different associations to the mind." 15. Tyrian hue. Explained by the "purple" in next line; an allusion to the famous Tyrian dye of the ancients. Cf. Pope, Windsor Forest, 142: "with fins of Tyrian dye." 17. Cf. Virgil, Geo. iv. 274: '■''Aureus ipse; sed in foliis, quae plurima circum Funduntur, violae sublucet purpura nigrae." See also Pope, Windsor Forest, 332 : " His shining horns diffus'd a golden glow;" Temple of Fame, 253 : "And lucid amber casts a golden gleam." 24. The 1st ed. reads " What cat's a foe to fish?" and in the next line one MS. has "with eyes intent." 31. Eight times. Alluding to the proverbial " nine lives " of the cat. 34. No dolphin came. An allusion to the story of Arion, who when thrown overboard by the sailors for the sake of his wealth was borne safely to land by a dolphin. No Nereid stirr'd. Cf. Milton, Lycidas, 50 : "Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep Closed o'er the head of your lov'd Lycidas?" 35, 36. The reading of 1st ed. is, " Nor cruel Tom nor Harry heard. What favourite has a friend?" 40. One MS. has "Not all that strikes," etc. 42. Nor all that glisters gold. A favourite proverb with the old English poets. Cf. Chaucer, C. T. 16430 : "But all thing which that shineth as the gold Ne is no gold, as I have herd it told;" Spenser, F. Q. ii. 8, 14 : "Yet gold all is not, that doth golden seeme; ,, Shakes. M. of V. ii. 7 : "All that glisters is not gold; Often have you heard that told ;" Dryden, Hind and Panther : "All, as they say, that glitters is not gold." Other examples might be given. Glisten is not found in Shakes, or Mil- ton, but both use glister several times. See W. T. iii. 2 ; Rich. II. iii. 3 ; T. A, ii. I, etc. ; Lycidas, 79 ; Comus, 219 ; P. L. iii. 550 ; iv. 645, 653, etc, L.ofC. ETON COLLEGE. ODE ON A DISTANT PROSPECT OF ETON COLLEGE. This, as Mason informs us, was the first English* production of Gray's that appeared in print. It was published, in folio, in 1747 ; and appeared again in Dodsley's Collection, vol. ii. p. 267, without the name of the author. Hazlitt [Lectures on English Poets) says of this Ode : " It is more me- chanical and commonplace [than the Elegy] ; 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.' " The writer in the North American Review (vol. xcvi.), after referring to the publication of this Ode, which, " according to the custom of the time, was judiciously swathed in folio," adds : * A Latin poem by him, a " Hymeneal " on the Prince of Wales's Marriage, had ap- peared in the Cambridge Collection in 1736. ON A DISTANT PROSPECT OF ETON COLLEGE. IO i " About this time Gray's portrait was painted, at Walpole's request ; and on the paper which he is represented as holding, Walpole wrote the title of the Ode, with a line from Lucan : 'Nee licuit populis parvum te, Nile, videre.' The poem met with very little attention until it was republished in 1751, with a few other of his Odes. Gray, in speaking of it to Walpole, in connection with the Ode to Spring, merely says that to him ' the latter seems not worse than the former.' But the former has always been the greater favourite — perhaps more from the matter than the manner. It is the expression of the memories, the thoughts, and the feelings which arise unbidden in the mind of the man as he looks once more on the scenes of his boyhood. He feels a new youth in the presence of those old joys. But the old friends are not there. Generations have come and gone, and an unknown race now frolic in boyish glee. His sad, pro- phetic eye cannot help looking into the future, and comparing these care- less joys with the inevitable ills of life. Already he sees the fury passions in wait for their little victims. They seem present to him, like very de- mons. Our language contains no finer, more graphic personifications than these almost tangible shapes. Spenser is more circumstantial, Collins more vehement, but neither is more real. Though but outlines in miniature, they are as distinct as Dutch art. Every epithet is a life- like picture ; not a word could be changed without destroying the tone of the whole. At last the musing poet asks himself, Cui bono? Why thus borrow trouble from the future ? Why summon so soon thte coming locusts, to poison before their time the glad waters of youth ? 'Yet ah! why should they know their fate, » Since sorrow never comes too late, And happiness too quickly flies? Thought would destroy their paradise. No more ; — where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise.' So feeling and the want of feeling come together for once in the moral. The gay Roman satirist — the apostle of indifferentism — reaches the same goal, though he has travelled a different road. To Thaliarchus he says : 'Quid sit futurum eras, fuge quaerere: et Quern Fors dierum cumque dabit, lucro Appone. ' The same easy-going philosophy of life forms the key-note of the Ode to Leuconoe : ' Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero ;' of that to Quinctius Hirpinus : ' Quid aetemis minorem Consiliis animum fatigas ?' of that to Pompeius Grosphus : ' Laetus in prae< Oderit curare.' And so with many others. * Take no thought of the morrow.' " Laetus in praesens animus, quod ultra est, Oderit curare.' 102 NOTES. Wakefield translates the Greek motto, " Man is an abundant subject of calamity." 2. That crown the watery glade. Cf. Pope, Windsor Forest ', 128: "And lonely woodcocks haunt the watery glade." 4. Her Henry's holy shade. Henry the Sixth, founder of the college. Cf. The Bard, ii. 3 : " the meek usurper's holy head ;" Shakes. Rich. III. v. 1 : "Holy King Henry;" Id. iv. 4: "When holy Harry died." The king, though never canonized, was regarded as a saint. 5. And ye. Ye " towers ;" that is, of Windsor Castle. Cf. Thomson, Summer, 14 1 2 : li And now to where Majestic Windsor lifts his princely brow." 8. Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among. " That is, the turf of whose lawn, the shade of whose groves, the flowers of whose mead " (Wakefield). Cf. Hamlet, iii. 1 : " The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword." In Anglo-Saxon and Early English prepositions were often placed after their objects. In the Elizabethan period the transposition of the weaker prepositions was not allowed, except in the compounds whereto, herewith, etc. (cf. the Latin quocum, secum), but the longer forms were still, though rarely, transposed (see Shakes. Gr. 203) ; and in more recent writers this latter license is extremely rare. Even the use of the preposition after the relative, which was very common in Shakespeare's day, is now avoided, except in colloquial style. 9. The hoary Thames. The river-god is pictured in the old classic fashion. Cf. Milton, Lycidas, 103 : " Next Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow." See also quotation from Dryden in note on 21 below. THE RIVER-GOD TIBER. ON A DISTANT PROSPECT OF ETON COLLEGE, 103 10. His silver-winding way. Cf. Thomson, Summer , 1425 : " The matchless vale of Thames, Fair-winding up," etc. 12. Ah, fields belov'd in vain! Mitford remarks that this expression has been considered obscure, and adds the following explanation : " The poem is written in the character of one who contemplates this life as a scene of misfortune and sorrow, from whose fatal power the brief sun- shine of youth is supposed to be exempt The fields are beloved as the scene of youthful pleasures, and as affording the promise of happiness to come ; but this promise never was fulfilled. Fate, which dooms man to misery, soon overclouded these opening prospects of delight. That is in vain beloved which does not realize the expectations it held out. No fruit but that of disappointment has followed the blossoms of a thought- less hope." 13. Where once my careless childhood strayed. Wakefield cites Thomson, Winter, 6 : "with frequent foot Pleas' d have I, in my cheerful morn of life, When nurs'd by careless Solitude I liv'd, And sung of Nature with unceasing joy, Pleas' d have I wander'd," etc. 15. That from ye blow. In Early English j^ is nominative, you accusa- tive (objective). This distinction, though observed in our version of the Bible, was disregarded by Elizabethan writers {Shakes. Gr. 236), as it has occasionally been by the poets even to our own day. Cf. Shakes. Hen. VIII. iii. 1 : " The more shame for ye ; holy men I thought ye ;" Milton, Comus, 216: "I see ye visibly," etc. Dryden, in a couplet quoted by Guest, uses both forms in the same line : "What gain you by forbidding it to tease ye? It now can neither trouble you nor please ye." 19. Gray quotes Dryden, Fable on Pythag. Syst. : " And bees their honey redolent of spring." 21. Say, father Thames, etc. This invocation is taken from Green's Grotto : " Say, father Thames, whose gentle pace Gives leave to view, what beauties grace Your flowery banks, if you have seen." Cf. Dryden, Annus Mirabilis, st. 232 : " Old father Thames raised up his reverend head." Dr. Johnson, in his hypercritical comments on this Ode, says : " His supplication to Father Thames, to tell him who drives the hoop or tosses the ball, is useless and puerile. Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself." To which Mitford replies by asking, "Are we by this rule to judge the following passage in the twentieth chapter of Rasselas ? ' As they were sitting together, the princess cast her eyes on the river that flowed before her : "Answer," said she, "great Father of Waters, thou that rollest thy floods through eighty nations, to the invo- cation of the daughter of thy native king. Tell me, if thou waterest, through all thy course, a single habitation from which thou dost not hear the murmurs of complaint." ' " 104 NOTES. 23. Margent green. Cf. Comus, 232 : " By slow Maerander's margent green." 24. Cf. Pope, Essay on Man, iii. 233 : " To Virtue, in the paths of Pleasure, trod." 26. Thy glassy wave. Cf. Comics, 861 : " Under the glassy, cool, trans- lucent wave." 27. The captive linnet. The adjective is redundant and " proleptic," as the bird must be " enthralled" before it can be called "captive." 29. In the MS. this line reads, "To chase the hoop's elusive speed," which seems to us better than the revised form in the text 30. Cf. Pope, Dunciad,\v. 592 : "The senator at cricket urge the ball." 37. Cf. Cowley, Ode to Hobbes, iv. 7 : "Till unknown regions it descries." 40. A fearful joy. Wakefield quotes Matt, xxviii. 8 and Psalms ii. 11. Cf. Virgil, sEn. i. 513 : "Obstupuit simul ipse simul perculsus Achates Laetitiaque metuque." See also Lear, v. 3 : " 'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief." 44. Cf. Pope, Eloisa, 209 : " Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind ;" and Essay on Man, iv. 168 : " The soul's calm sunshine, and the heart- felt joy." 45. Buxoni. Used here in its modern sense. It originally meant pliant, flexible, yielding (from A. S. biigan, to bow) ; then, gay, frolicsome, lively ; and at last it became associated with the " cheerful comeliness " of vigor- ous health. Chaucer has " buxom to ther lawe," and Spenser (State of Ireland), " more tractable and buxome to his government." Cf. also E. Q. i. 11,37 : "the buxome aire ;" an expression which Milton uses twice (P. L. ii. 842, v. 270). In H Allegro, 24 : " So buxom, blithe, and debonaire;" the only other instance in which he uses the word, it means sprightly or " free " (as in " Come thou goddess, fair and free," a few lines before). Cf. Shakes. Pericles, i. prologue : " So buxom, blithe, and full of face, As heaven had lent her all his grace." The word occurs nowhere else in Shakes, except Hen. V. iii. 6 : " Of buxom valour ;" that is, lively valour. Dr. Johnson appears to have had in mind the original meaning of buxom in his comment on this passage : " His epithet buxom health is not elegant ; he seems not to understand the word." 47. Lively cheer. Cf. Spenser, Shep. Kal. Apr. : " In either cheeke de- peincten lively chere ;" Milton, Ps. lxxxiv. 27 : " With joy and gladsome cheer." 49. Wakefield quotes Milton, P. L. v. 3 : "When Adam vvak'd, so custom' d; for his sleep Was airy light, from pure digestion bred, And temperate vapours bland." 51. Regardless of their doom. Collins, in the first manuscript of his Ode on the Death of Col. Ross, has ON A DISTANT PROSPECT OF ETON COLLEGE. 105 " E'en now, regardful of his doom, Applauding Honour haunts his tomb."* 55. Yet see, etc. Mitford cites Broome, Ode on Melancholy : " While round stern ministers of fate, Pain and Disease and Sorrow, wait ;" and Otway, Alcibiades, v. 2 : " Then enter, ye grim ministers of fate." See also Progress of Poesy, ii. 1 : " Man's feeble race," etc. 59. Murthei-ous. The obsolete spelling of murderous, still used in Gray's time. 61. The fury Passions. The passions, fierce and cruel as the mythical Furies. Cf. Pope, Essay on Man, iii. 167 : " The fury Passions from that blood began." 66. Mitford quotes Spenser, F. Q. : "But gnawing Jealousy out of their sight, Sitting alone, his bitter lips did bite." 68. Wakefield quotes Milton, Sonnet to Mr. Lawes : " With praise enough for Envy to look wan." 69. Grim-visag V, comfortless Despair. Cf. Shakes. Rich. III. i. 1 : " Grim-visag'd War ;" and C.ofE.v.i: " grim and comfortless Despair." 76. Unkindness 1 altered eye. " An ungraceful elision " of the possessive inflection, as Mason calls it. Cf. Dryden, Hind a?td Panther, iii. : " Af- fected Kindness with an alter'd face." 79. Gray quotes Dryden, Pal. and Arc. : " Madness laughing in his ireful mood." Cf. Shakes. He?z. VI. iv. 2 : " But rather moody mad ;" and iii. 1 : " Moody discontented fury." 81. The vale of years. Cf. Othello, iii. 3 : "Declin'd Into the vale of years." 82. Grisly. Not to be confounded with grizzly. See Wb. 83. The painful family of death. Cf. Pope, Essay on Mail, ii. 118: " Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of Pain ;" and Dryden, State of Inno- cence, v. 1 : "With all the numerous family of Death." On the whole passage cf. Milton, P. L. xi. 477-493. See also Virgil, AL11. vi. 275. 86. That every labouring smew strains. An example of the " corre- spondence of sound with sense." As Pope says (Essay on Criticism, 371), "The line too labours, and the words move slow." 90. Slow-consuming Age. Cf. Shenstone, Love and Ho?iour : " His slow- consuming fires." 95. As Wakefield remarks, we meet with the same thought in Comus, 359 : " Peace, brother, be not over-exquisite To cast the fashion of uncertain evils ; For grant they be so, while they rest unknown What need a man forestall his date of grief, And run to meet what he would most avoid?" * Mitford gives the first line as " E'en now, regardless of his doom ;" and just below, on verse 61, he makes the line from Pope read, " The fury Passions from that flood began." We have verified his quotations as far as possible, and have corrected scores of errors in them. Quite likely there are some errors in those we have n ot been able to verify. io6 NOTES. 97. Happiness too swiftly flies. Perhaps a reminiscence of Virgil, Geo. iii. 66 : ..,.,• ''Optima quaeque dies misens mortalibus aevi Prima fugit." Gosse puts an interrogation mark after fate and a comma after flies thus connecting 96 and 97 with what follows ; but the ed. of 1768, though it has the interrogation mark after fate, has a period after flies. Out- pointing is the modern equivalent of Gray's. 08 Thought would destroy their paradise. Wakefield quotes Sophocles, Ajax, 554 : Ev r<£ <^o^aV yap /ijj&v vSkjtoq [3to<; (" Absence of thought is prime felicity "). 99. Cf. Prior, Ep. to Montague, st. 9 : " From ignorance our comfort flows, The only wretched are the wise." and Davenant, Just Italian : " Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy, it is not safe to know." WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM THE END OF THE LONG WALK. OIKOYME NH XPONOI IAIAZ OAYZZEIA OMI1POS MY0OI HOMER ENTHRONED. THE PROGRESS OF POESY. This Ode, as we learn from one of Gray's letters to Walpole, was finished, with the exception of a few lines, in 1755. It was not published until 1757, when it appeared with The Bard in a quarto volume, which was the first issue of Walpole's press at Strawberry Hill. In one of his letters Walpole writes : " I send you two copies of a very honourable opening of my press — two amazing odes of Mr. Gray. They are Greek, they are Pindaric, they are sublime, consequently I fear a little obscure ; the second particularly, by the confinement of the measure and the nature of prophetic vision, is mysterious. I could not persuade him to add more notes." In another letter Walpole says : " I found Gray in town last week ; he had brought his two odes to be printed. I snatched them out of Dodsley's hands, and they are to be the first-fruits of my press." The title-page of the volume is as follows : ODES I by I Mr. GRAY. | fcQNANTA 2TNET0I2I— Pindar, Olymp. II. I PRINTED at STRAWBERRY-HILL, | for R. and J. Dodsley in Pall-Mali. | MDCCLVII. Both Odes were coldly received at first. " Even my friends," writes Gray, in a letter to Hurd, Aug. 25, 1757, "tell me they do not succeed, io 8 NOTES. and write me moving topics of consolation on that head. In short, I have heard of nobody but an Actor [Garrick] and a Doctor of Divinity [Warburton] that profess their esteem for them. Oh yes, a Lady of quality (a friend of Mason's) who is a great reader. She knew there was a compliment to Dryden, but never suspected there was anything said about wShakespeare or Milton, till it was explained to her, and wishes that there had been titles prefixed to tell what they were about."* In a letter to Dr. Wharton, dated Aug. 17, 1757, he says : " I hear we are not at all popular. The great objection is obscurity, nobody knows what we would be at. One man (a Peer) I have been told of, that thinks the last stanza of the 2d Ode relates to Charles the First and Oliver Cromwell ; in short, the ^wtrol appear to be still fewer than even I expected." A writer in the Critical Review thought that "^Eolian lyre " meant the ^Eolian harp. Coleman the elder and Robert Lloyd wrote parodies entitled Odes to Obscurity and Oblivion. Gray finally had to add explanatory notes, though he intimates that his readers ought not to have needed them.f " The metre of these Odes is constructed on Greek models. It is not uniform but symmetrical. The nine stanzas of each ode form three groups. A slight examination will show that the 1st, 4th, and 7th stanzas are ex- actly inter-correspondent ; so the 2d, 5th, and 8th ; and so the remaining three. The technical Greek names for these three parts were arpoipri (strophe), apriarpocprj (antistrophe), and tTrwcog (epodos) — the Turn, the Counter-turn,- and the After-song — names derived from the theatre; the Turn denoting the movement of the Chorus from one side of the cpxnorpd (orchestra), or Dance-stage, to the other, the Counter-turn the reverse movement, the After-song something sung after two such movements. Odes thus constructed were called by the Greeks Epodic. Congreve is said to have been the first who so constructed English odes. This system cannot be said to have prospered with us. Perhaps no English ear would instinctively recognize that correspondence between distant parts which is the secret of it. Certainly very many readers of The Progress of Poesy are wholly unconscious of any such harmony" (Hales). * Forster remarks that Gray might have added to the admirers of the Odes ' ' the poor monthly critic of The Dunciad" — Oliver Goldsmith, then beginning his London career as a bookseller's hack. In a review of the Odes in the London Monthly Review for Sept , 1757, after citing certain passages of The Bard, he says that they "will give as much pleasure to those who relish this species of composition as anything that has hitherto ap- peared in our language, the odes of Dryden himself not excepted." t In a foot-note he says: " When the author first published this and the following Ode, he was advised, even by his friends, to subjoin some few explanatory notes ; but had too much respect for the understanding of his readers to take that liberty." In a letter to Beattie, dated Feb. 1, 1768, referring to the new edition of his poems, he says : " As to the notes, I do it out of spite, because the public did not understand the two Odes (which I have called Pindaric), though the first was not very dark, and the second alluded to a few common facts to be found in any sixpenny history of England, by way of question and answer, for the use of children." And in a letter to Walpole, Feb. 25, 1768, he says he has added " certain little Notes, partly from justice (to acknowledge the debt where I had borrowed anything^, partly from ill temper, just to tell the gentle reader that Edward I. was not Oliver Cromwell, nor Queen Elizabeth the Witch of Endor." Mr. Fox, afterwards Lord Holland, said that "if the Bard recited his Ode only once to Edward, he was sure he could not understand it." When this was told to Gray, he said, " If he had recited it twenty times, Edward would not have been a bit wiser; but that was no reason why Mr. Fox should not." THE PROGRESS OF POESY. 109 **k A ' 12 : " Purpurei metuunt tyranni." 8. With pangs unfelt before. Cf. Milton, P. L. ii. 703 : " Strange horror seize thee, and pangs unfelt before." For unpitied and alone the MS: has " and Misery not thine own." 9-12. Cf. Bacon, Essays, v. (ed. 1625) : " Certainly, Vertue is like pre- tious Odours, most fragrant when they are incensed [that is, burned], or crushed :* For Prosperity doth best discover Vice ;t But Adversity doth best discover Vertue." Cf. also Thomson : " If Misfortune comes, she brings along The bravest virtues. And so many great Illustrious spirits have convers'd with woe, Have in her school been taught, as are enough To consecrate distress, and make ambition E'en wish the frown beyond the smile of fortune." 16. Cf. Virgil, Alii. i. 630 : " Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco." 18. Folly's idle brood. Cf. the opening lines of II Penseroso : " Hence, vain deluding Jovs, The brood of Folly, without father bred!" 20. Mitford quotes Oldham, Ode: "And know I have not yet the leisure to be good." 21. The summer friend. Cf. Geo. Herbert, Temple: "like summer friends, flies of estates and sunshine ;" Quarles, Sion's Elegies, xix. : "Ah, summer friendship with the summer ends ;" Massinger, Maid of Honour : "O summer friendship." See also Shakespeare, T. of A. iii. 6: " 2d Lord. The swallow follows not summer more willing than we your lordship. " Tim on [aside]. Nor more willingly leaves winter • such summer-birds are men ;" and T. and C. iii. 3 : * So in his Apophthegms, 253, Bacon says: "Mr. Bettenham said; that virtuous men were like some herbs and spices, that give not their sweet smell till they be broken or crushed.' ' t Cf. Shakespeare, Julius Ccesar, ii. 1 : " It is the bright day that brings forth the adder." HYMN TO ADVERSITY. i 37 "For men, like butterflies, Shew not their mealy wings but to the summer." Mitford suggests that Gray had in mind Horace, Od. i. 35, 25 : "At vulgus infidum et meretrix retro Perjura cedit ; diffugiunt cadis Cum faece siccatis amici Ferre jugum pariter dolosi." 25. In sable garb. Cf. Milton, 77 Pens. 16 : " O'erlaid with black, staid Wisdom's hue." 28. With leaden eye. Evidently suggested by Milton's description of Melancholy, // Pens. 43 : " Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes ; There, held in holy passion still, Forget thyself to marble, till With a sad leaden downward cast Thou fix them on the earth as fast." Mitford cites Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, song 7 : "So leaden eyes ;" Dryden, Cymon and Iphigenia, 57 : " And stupid eyes that ever lov'd the ground ;" Shakespeare, Pericles, i. 2 : " The sad companion, dull- eyed Melancholy ;" and L. L. I. iv. 3 : " In leaden contemplation." Cf. also The Bard, 69, 70. 31. To herself severe. Cf. Carew : "To servants kind, to friendship dear, To nothing but herself severe ;" and Dryden : " Forgiving others, to himself severe ;" and Waller : " The Muses' friend, unto himself severe." Mitford quotes several other similar passages. 32. The sadly pleasing tear. Rogers cites Dryden's " sadly pleasing thought" (Virgil's ALn. x.) ; and Mitford compares Thomson's "lenient, not unpleasing tear." 35. Gorgon terrors. Cf. Milton, P. I. ii. 61 1 : " Medusa with Gorgonian terror." 36-40. Cf. Ode on Eton College, 55-70 and 81-90. 46-49. Cf. Shakespeare, As You Like It, ii. l : " these are counsellors That feelingly persuade me what I am. Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head ;" and Mallet "Who hath not known ill-fortune, never knew Himself, or his own virtue." Guizot, in his Cromwell, says : " The effect of supreme and irrevocable misfortune is to elevate those souls which it does not deprive of all virtue ;" and Sir Philip Sidney remarks : " A noble heart, like the sun, showeth its greatest countenance in its lowest estate." " Now rolling down the steep amain, Headlong, impetuous, see it pour; The rocks and nodding groves rebellow to the roar." The Progress of Poesy, 10. APPENDIX TO NOTES. Just as this book is going to press we have received The Quarterly Review (London) for January, 1876, which contains an interesting paper on " Wordsworth and Gray." After quoting Wordsworth's remark that " Gray was at the head of those poets who, by their reasonings, have attempted to widen the space of separation between prose and metrical composition, and was, more than any other man, curiously elaborate in the construction of his own poetic diction," the reviewer remarks : " The indictment, then, brought by Wordsworth against Gray is two- fold. Gray, it seems, had in the first place a false conception of the nature of poetry ; and, secondly, a false standard of poetical diction. To begin with the first count, Gray, we are told, sought to widen the space of separation betwixt prose and metrical composition. W 7 hat this charge amounts to we shall see hereafter. Meantime, did Wordsworth think that between prose and poetry there was any line of demarcation at all ? In the Preface [to the "Lyrical Ballads"] from which we have quoted we read : " * There neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition. We are fond of tracing the resemblance between Poetry and Painting, and accordingly we call them sisters ; but where shall we find bonds of connection sufficiently strong to typify the connection betwixt prose and metrical composition ?' " Now this question admits of a very definite answer. Take the Iliad of Homer and a proposition of Euclid. Is it conceivable that the latter could have been expressed at all in metre, or the former expressed half so well in prose ? If not, what is the reason ? Is it not plain that the poem contains a predominant element of imagination and feeling which is absolutely excluded from the proposition ? And in the same way it may be shown that whenever a man expresses himself properly in metre, the subject-matter of his composition belongs to imagination or feeling ; whenever he writes in prose his subject belongs to or (if the prose be fic- tion) intimately resembles matter of fact. We may decide then with cer- tainty that the sphere of poetry lies in Imagination, and that the larger the amount of just liberty the Imagination enjoys, the better will be the poetry it produces. But then a further question arises, and this is the key of the whole position, How far does this liberty extend ? Is Imag- ination absolute, supreme, and uncontrolled in its own sphere, or is it under the guidance and government of reason? That its dominion is not universal is obvious, but of its influence we are all conscious, and there is no exaggeration in the eloquent words of Pascal : 140 APPENDIX TO NOTES. " ' This mighty power, the perpetual antagonist of reason, which delights to show its ascendency by bringing her under its control and dominion, has created a second nature in man. It has its joys and its sorrows ; its health, its sickness ; its wealth, its poverty ; it compels reason, in spite of herself, to believe, to doubt, to deny ; it suspends the exercise of the senses, and imparts to them again an artificial acuteness ; it has its follies and its wisdom ; and the most perverse thing of all is that it fills its vota- ries with a complacency more full and complete even than that which reason can supply.' " If such be the force of Imagination in active life, how absolute must be its dominion in poetry ! And absolute it is, if we are to believe Wordsworth, who defines poetry to be ' the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion.' This definition coincides well with modern notions on the nature of the art. But how different is the view if we turn from theory to practice ! It would surely be a serious mistake to describe the noblest poems, like the '^Eneid ' or ' Paradise Lost,' as the product of mere spontaneous emotion. And even in lyric verse, to which it may be said Wordsworth is specially alluding, we find the greatest poets, like Pindar and Simonides, composing their odes for set occasions like the public games, in honour of persons with whom they were but little ac- quainted, and (most significant fact of all) in the expectation of receiving liberal rewards. We need not say that such considerations detract nothing from the genius of these great poets ; but they prove very conclusively that poetry is not what Wordsworth's definition asserts, and what in these days it is too often assumed to be, the mere gush of unconscious inspiration. The definition of Wordsworth may perhaps suit short lyrics, such as he was himself in the habit of composing, but it would be fatal to the claims of poetry to rank among the higher arts, for it would exclude that quality which, in poetry as in all art, is truly sovereign, Invention. The poet, no less than the mechanical inventor, excels by the exercise of reason, by his knowledge of the required effect, his power of adapting means to ends, and his skill in availing himself of circumstances. Consider for a moment the external difficulties which restrict the poet's liberty, and require the most vigorous efforts of reason to subdue them. To begin with, in order to secure the happy result promised by Horace, ' Cui lecta potenter erit res Nee facundia deseret hunc nee lucidus ordo,' he has to take the exact measure of his own powers. How many a poet has failed for want of judgment by trespassing on a subject and style for which his genius is unfitted ! Again, he is confronted by the most obvious difficulties of language and metre, which limit his freedom to a degree unknown to the prose-writer. And beyond this, if he wishes to be read — and a poem without readers is no more than a musical instrument with- out a musician — he has to consider the character of his audience. He must have all the instinct of an orator, all the intuitive knowledge of the world, as well as all the practical resource, which are required to gain command over the hearts of men, and to subdue, by the charms of elo- quence, their passions, their prejudices, and their judgment. To achieve APPENDIX TO NOTES. 141 such results something more is required than ' the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling.' " How far Wordsworth's own poetry illustrates his principles we shall consider presently ; meantime his definition helps us to understand what he meant by Gray's fault of widening the space of separation betwixt prose and metrical composition. Neither in respect of the quantity nor the quality of his verse could Gray's manner, of composition be described as spontaneous. Compared with Wordsworth's numerous volumes of poetry, the, slender volume that contains the poetry of Gray looks meagre indeed ; yet almost every poem in this small collection is a considered work of art. To begin with ' The Bard.' Few readers, we suppose, would rise from this ode without a sense of its poetical * effect.' The details may be thought to require too much attention ; the allusions, from the nature of the subject, are, no doubt, difficult ; but a feeling of loftiness, of har- mony, of proportion, remains in the mind at the close of the poem, which is not likely to pass away. How, then, was this effect produced ? First of all we see that Gray had selected a good subject ; his raw materials, so to speak, were poetical. The imagination, unembarrassed by common associations, breathes freely in its own region, and is instinctively elevated as it moves among the great events of the past, dwelling on the misfor- tunes of monarchs, the rise of dynasties, and the splendours of literature. But, in the second place, when he has chosen his subject, it is the part of the poet to impress the great ideas derived from it on the feelings and the memory by the distinctness of the form under which he presents it ; and here poetical invention first begins to work. By the imaginative fic- tion of * The Bard,' Gray is enabled to cast the whole course of English history into the form of a prophecy, and to excite the patriotic feelings of the reader, as Virgil roused the pride of his own countrymen by Anchises' forecast of the grandeur of Rome. Finally, when the main design of the poem is thus conceived, observe with what art all the different parts are made to emphasize the beauty of the general conception ; with what dra- matic propriety the calamities of the conquering Plantagenet are proph- esied by his vanquished foe ; while on the other hand, the literary glories of the Tudor Elizabeth awaken the triumph of the patriot and the poet; how martial and spirited is the opening of the poem ! how lofty and en- thusiastic its close ! Perhaps there is no English lyric which, animated by equal fervour, displays so much architectural genius as * The Bard.' "Take, again, the 'Ode on the Prospect of Eton College.' A subject better adapted for the indulgence of personal feeling, or for those senti- mental confidences between the reader and the poet, in which the modern muse so much delights, could not be imagined. But what do we find ? The theme is treated in the most general manner. Though emphasizing the irony of his reflection by the beautiful touch of memory in the second stanza, the poet speaks throughout as a moralist or spectator ; from first to last he seems to lose all thought of himself in contemplating the trag- edies he foresees for others ; the subject is in fact handled with the most skilful rhetoric, and every stanza is made to strengthen and elaborate the leading thought. In the ' Progress of Poesy,' though the general con- structive effect is perhaps inferior to ' The Bard,' we see the same evidence 142 APPENDIX TO NOTES. of careful preconsideration, while the course of the poem is particularly distinguished by the beauty of the transitions. Of the form of the • Elegy ' it is superfluous to speak ; a poem so dignified and yet so tender, appeals immediately, and will continue to appeal, to the heart of every English- man, so long as the care of public liberty and love of the soil maintain their hold in this country. In this poem, as indeed in all that Gray ever wrote, we find it his first principle to prefer his subject to himself; he never forgot that while he was a man he was also an artist, and he knew that the function of art was not merely to indulge nature, but to dignify and refine it. " Yet, in spite of his love of form, there is nothing frigid or statuesque in the genius of Gray. A vein of deep melancholy, evidently constitu- tional, runs through his poetry, and, considering how little he produced, the number of personal allusions in his verses is undoubtedly large. But he is entirely free from that egotism which we have had frequent occasion to blame as the prevailing vice of modern poetry. For whereas the mod- ern poet thrusts his private feelings into prominence, and finds a luxury in the confession of his sorrows, Gray's references to himself are intro- duced on public grounds, or, in other words, with a view to poetical effect. He, like our own bards, is ' condemned to groan,' but for different reasons — 'The tender for another's pain, The unfeeling for his own.' " We have already remarked on the public character of the ' Ode on Eton College ;' but the second stanza of this poem is a pure expression of individual feeling : ' Ah, happy hills ! ah, pleasing shade ! Ah, fields belov' d in vain ! Where once my careless childhood play'd, 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 soothe, And, redolent of joy and youth, To breathe a second spring.' Every one will perceive the art which enforces the truth of the general reflections that follow by the personal experience of the speaker. Again, the ' Progress of Poesy ' closes with a personal allusion which, as it is a climax, might, if ill-managed, have appeared arrogant, but which is, in fact, a masterpiece of oratory. After confessing his own inferiority to Pindar, the poet proceeds : ' Yet oft before his infant eyes would run Such forms as glitter in the Muse's ray, With orient hues, unborrow'd of the sun; Yet shall he mount, and keep his distant way, Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate, Beneath the Good how far— but far above the Great!' There is something very noble in the elevated manner in which the self- complacent triumph of genius, expressed by so many poets from Ennius downwards, is at once justified and chastened by the reflection in these APPENDIX TO NOTES. I43 lines. We see in them that the poet alludes to himself in the third per- son, and he repeats this style in the * Elegy,' where, after the fourth line, the first personal pronoun is never again used. How just and beautiful is the turn where, after contemplating the general lot of the lowly society he is celebrating, he proceeds to identify his own fate with theirs : ' For thee^ who, mindful of th' unhonour'd dead, Dost in these, lines their artless tale relate, If, chance, by lonely contemplation led, Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate, ' Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,' etc. " The two great characteristics of Gray's poetry that we have noticed — his self-suppression and his sense of form and dignity — are best described by the word ' classical.' What we particularly admire in the great authors of Greece and Rome is their public spirit. Their writings are full of patriotism, good-breeding, and common-sense, and have that happy mix- ture of art and nature which is only acquired by men who have learned from liberty how to discipline individual instincts by social refinement. Their style is masculine, clear, and moderate ; they seem, as it were, never to lose the sense of being before an audience, and, like orators who know that they are always exposed to the judgment of their intellectual equals, they aim at putting intelligible thoughts into the most natural and forcible words. Precisely the same qualities are observable in all the best Eng- lish writers of the eighteenth century. Addison, Pope, and Goldsmith are perhaps the most shining examples, but the rest are 'classical' in the sense which we have just indicated ; and we can hardly be wrong in ascribing this common rhetorical instinct to the intimate connection be- tween the men of thought and the men of action, which existed both in the free states of antiquity, and in England under the rule of the aris- tocracy. With the advance of the eighteenth century the instinct in English literature seems to grow weaker ; the style of our authors be- comes more formal and constrained, and symptoms of that dislike of society encouraged by the philosophy of Rousseau more frequently betray themselves. As the poetry of Cowper shows less social instinct than that of Gray, so Gray himself is inferior in this respect to Pope and Goldsmith. But his style has the same lofty public spirit that distinguishes his favour- ite models, and no worthier form could be imagined to express the ardour excited in the heart of a patriotic poet by the rising fortunes of his native country. We feel that it is in every way fitting that the author of the 1 Elegy ' should have been the favourite of Wolfe and the countryman of Chatham." CLlQ, THE MUSE OF HISTORV- INDEX OF WORDS EXPLAINED. iEolian, 109. afield, 86. amain, no. antic, in. Arvon, 125. Attic warbler, 95. Berkeley, 126. boar (of Richard III.), 130. broke (^broken), 86. buskined, 132. buxom, 104. Cadwallo, 125. Caernarvon, 125. captive (proleptic), 104. chance (adverb), 91. cheer, 104. churchway, 92. curfew, 83. customed, 92. Cytherea, in. Delphi, 114. fond (=foolish), in, 132. fretted, 87. glister, 99. Gloster, 124. Gorgon, 137. graved, 93. grisly, 105, 126. grove (=graved), 93. haggard, 124. hauberk, 123. Helicon, fog. Hoel, 124. honied, 96. Horas, 94. Hyperion, 112. Idalia, no. Ilissus, 114. jet, 99. leaden (eye), 136. lion-port, 132. little (=petty), 89. Llewellyn, 124. long- expecting, 95. Maeander, 114. margent, 104. Modred, 125. Mortimer, 124. murther, 129. murtherous, 10c. nightly (=nocturnal\ 123. parting (^departing), 83. pious (-=pius), 90. Plinlimmon, 125. provoke i^provocare), 87. purple, 95, in, 135. rage, 88. repair, 132. repeat, 113. rose (of snow), 130. rushy, 96. shrggy, 123. shell (=lyre), no. slow-ccnsuming, 105. Snowdon, 123 . solemn-breathing, no. summer friend, 136. tabby, 99. Taliessin, 132. tempered, no. Thracia, no. Tyrian, 99. upland, 91= Urien, 125. velvet-green, no. woeful-wan, 92. ye (accusative), 1*3. K Rolfe's English Classics DESIGNED FOR USE IN HIGH SCHOOLS AND OTHER SECONDARY SCHOOLS Edited by WILLIAM J. ROLFE, Litt.D. Formerly Head Master, High School, Cambridge, Mass. Bound in uniform flexible cloth, 12mo. Illustrated. 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The work comprises an Introduction, giving a short but remarkably clear outline of English grammar; Part I., on Words; Part II., on Sentences; Part III., on Paragraphs; and an Appendix on Punctuation. h.LL'S PRINCIPLES OF RHETORIC For Academies and Colleges . . . . . $1.20 This popular work has been almost wholly rewritten, and is enlarged by the addition of important new material. The treatment is based on the principle that the function of rhetoric is not to provide the student of composition with materials for thought, nor yet to lead him to cultivate style for style's sake, but to stimulate and train his powers of expression — to enable him to say what he has to say in appropriate language, and that rhetoric should be studied at school and in college, not as a science, but as an art with practical ends in view. By supplying deficiencies that time has disclosed, making rough places smooth, and adopting the treatment of each topic to present needs, the book in its revised form has been made more serviceable for advanced students of English composition. Copies of either of the above books will be sent, prepaid \ to any address on receipt of the price : American Book Company New York * Cincinnati ♦ Chicago (S. S. 87) Practical Rhetoric A Rational and Comprehensive Text-Book for the use of High Schools and Colleges. By JOHN DUNCAN QUACKENBOS, A.M., M.D. Emeritus Professor of Rhetoric in Columbia University. Cloth, 12 mo, 477 pages . . . . . Price, $1.00 This work differs materially from all other text- books of rhetoric both in plan and method of treatment. It first develops, in a perfectly natural manner, the laws and principles which underlie rhetorical art, and then shows their use and practical application in the different processes and kinds of composition. The book is clear, simple, and logical in its treatment, original in its departure from technical rules and traditions, copiously illustrated with examples, and calculated in every way to awaken interest and enthusiasm in the study. A large part of the book is devoted to instruction and practice in actual composition work in which the pupil is encouraged to follow and apply genuine laboratory methods. The lessons are so arranged that the whole course, including the outside constructive work, may be satis- factorily completed in a single school year. Copies of Quackenbos 's Practical Rhetoric will be sent prepaid to any address, on receipt of the price, by the Publishers. Correspond- ence relating to terms for introduction is cordially invited, American Book Company New York ♦ Cincinnati ♦ Chicago (S. S. 88) For the Study of Literature BLAISDELL'S FIRST STEPS WITH AMERICAN AND BRITISH AUTHORS 90 cents This book is now presented in a thoroughly revised and im- proved form, making it still more valuable to teachers desirous of using the best methods of teaching literature. BROOKE'S ENGLISH LITERATURE (Literature Primer Series) 35 cents A new edition of this popular text-book, revised and corrected, with chapters on the Victorian authors. HALLECK'S HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE . $1.25 A new text-book treating the history and development of English literature from the earliest times to the present in a concise and interesting manner. JOHNSON'S OUTLINE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE $1.25 A comprehensive history of both English and American litera- ture, designed as a text-book for a year's study of the subject. The treatment is based on the historic method and in plan and arrange- ment is particularly well adapted for use in the study, the class room, or the reading circle. MATTHEWS'S INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE $1.00 A text-book of literature on an original plan, admirably designed to guide, to supplement, and to stimulate the student's reading of American authors. PHILLIPS'S MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 2 vols. Each $2.00 A popular manual of English literature, including also outlines of French, German, Italian, and Spanish literatures, with historical, literary, and art notes. ROBERTSON'S HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE . $1.25 A brief but comprehensive compendium of the history of English literature for secondary schools. WATKINS'S AMERICAN LITERATURE (Literature Primer Series) 35 cents A text-book of American literature adapted to the comprehen- sion of pupils in intermediate or grammar schools. Copies of any of the above books will be sent, prepaid \ to any address on receipt of the price by the Publishers : American Book Company New York ♦ Cincinnati ♦ Chicago (S. S. 89) A History of English Literature By REUBEN POST HALLECK, M.A. (Yale) Cloth, 12mo, 499 pages. With numerous illustrations. Price $1.25 Halleck's History of English Literature is a concise and interest- ing text-book of the history and development of English literature from the earliest times to the present. While this work is sufficiently simple to be readily comprehended by high school students, the treat- ment is not only philosophic, but also stimulating and suggestive, and will naturally lead to original thinking. The book is a history of literature and not a mere collection of biographical sketches. Only enough of the facts of an author's life are given to make students interested in him as a personality, and to show how his environment affected his work. The author's produc- tions, their relation to the age, and the reasons why they hold a position in literature, receive treatment commensurate with their importance. One of the most striking features of the work consists in the way in which literary movements are clearly outlined at the beginning of each of the chapters. Special attention is given to the essential qualities which differentiate one period from another, and to the ani- mating spirit of each age. The author shows that each period has contributed something definite to the literature of England, either in laying characteristic foundations, in presenting new ideals, in improv- ing literary form, or in widening the circle of human thought. At the end of each chapter a carefully prepared list of books i s given to direct the student in studying the original works of the authors treated. He is told not only what to read, but also where to find it at the least cost. The book contains as a frontispiece a Literary Map of England in colors, showing the counties, the birthplaces, the homes, and the haunts of the chief authors, specially prepared for this work. Copies of Halleck's History of English Literature will be sent, prepaid, to any address on receipt of price* American Book Company New York ♦ Cincinnati ♦ Chicago (S. S. 90) An Introduction to the Study of American Literature By BRANDER MATTHEWS Professor of Literature in Columbia University Cloth, 12mo, 256 pages . . . Price, $1.00 A text-book of literature on an original plan, and conforming with the best methods of teaching. Admirably designed to guide, to supplement, and to stimulate the student's reading of American authors. Illustrated with a fine collection of facsimile manuscripts, portraits of authors, and views of their homes and birthplaces. Bright, clear, and fascinating, it is itself a literary work of high rank. The book consists mostly of delightfully readable and yet comprehensive little biographies of the fifteen greatest and most representative American writers. Each of the sketches contains a critical estimate of the author and his works, which is the more valuable, coming, as it does, from one who is himself a master. The work is rounded out by four general chapters which take up other prominent authors and discuss the history and conditions of our literature as a whole ; and there is at the end of the book a complete chronology of the best American literature from the beginning down to 1896. Each of the fifteen biographical sketches is illustrated by a fine portrait of its subject and views of his birthplace or residence and in some cases of both. They are also accompanied by each author's facsimile manuscript covering one or two pages. The book contains excellent portraits of many other authors famous in American literature. Copies of Brander Matthews's Introduction to the Study of American Literature will be sent prepaid to atiy address, on receipt of the price, by the Publishers: American Book Company New York • Cincinnati ♦ Chicago (S.S.91) Webster's School Dictionaries REVISED EDITIONS WEBSTER'S SCHOOL DICTIONARIES in their revised form constitute a progressive series, carefully graded and especially adapted for Primary Schools, Common Schools, High Schools, Acad- emies, and private students. These Dictionaries have all been thoroughly revised, entirely reset, and made to conform in all essential respects to that great standard authority in English — Web- ster's International Dictionary. WEBSTER'S PRIMARY SCHOOL DICTIONARY . . . $0.48 Containing over 20,000 words and meanings, with over 400 illustrations. WEBSTER'S COMMON SCHOOL DICTIONARY . . $0.72 Containing over 25,000 words and meanings, with over 500 illustrations. WEBSTER'S HIGH SCHOOL DICTIONARY . . . $0.98 Containing about 37,000 words and definitions, and an appendix giving a pronouncing vocabulary of Biblical, Classical, Mythological, Historical, and Geographical proper names, with over 800 illustrations. WEBSTER'S ACADEMIC DICTIONARY. Cloth, $1.50 ; Indexed, $1.80 The Same . . . Half Calf, $2.75 ; Indexed, $3.00 Abridged directly from the International Dictionary, and giving the orthography, pronunciations, definitions, and synonyms of the large vocabulary of words in common use, with an appendix con- taining various useful tables, with over 800 illustrations. SPECIAL EDITIONS Webster's Countinghouse Dictionary . Sheep, Indexed, $2.40 Webster's Condensed Dictionary. Cloth, $1.44; Indexed, 1.75 The Same . . Half Calf, $2.75 ; Indexed, 3.00 Webster's Handy Dictionary .15 Webster's Pocket Dictionary. Cloth 57 The Same. Roan Flexible 69 The Same. Roan Tucks .78 The Same. Morocco, Indexed 90 Webster's American People's Dictionary and Manual . .48 Webster's Practical Dictionary 80 Copies of any of Webster's Dictionaries will be sent, prepaid \ to any address on receipt of the price by the Publishers : American Book Company New York ♦ Cincinnati ♦ Chicago (S. S. 104) American Literature By MILDRED CABELL WATKINS Flexible cloth, 18mo, 224 pages . Price, 35 cents The eminently practical character ot this work will at once commend it to all who are interested in forming and guiding the literary tastes of the young, and especially to teachers who have long felt the need of a satisfactory text-book in American literature which will give pupils a just apprecia- tion of its character and worth as compared with the literature of other countries. In this convenient volume the story of American literature is told to young Americans in a manner which is at once brief, simple, graceful, and, at the same time, impressive and intelligible. The marked features and charac- teristics of this work may be stated as follows : Due prominence is given to the works of the real makers of our American literature. All the leading authors are grouped in systematic order and classes. Living writers, including minor authors, are also given their proper share of attention. A brief summary is appended to each chapter to aid the memory in fixing the salient facts of the narrative. Estimates of the character and value of an author's pro- ductions are often crystallized in a single phrase, so quaint and expressive that it is not easily forgotten by the reader. Numerous select extracts from our greatest writers are given in their proper connection. Copies of Watkins's American Literature will be sent prepaid by the publishers on receipt of the price. American Book Company New York ♦ Cincinnati ♦ Chicago (S. S. 92) FEB 1 7 1904 '•" ,; .',V m m SMI 3BH •.Wv.V, MIL wmm Hi m