Wisdom in sable garb arrayed, Immersed in rapt'rous thought profound, With leaden eye that loves the ground, Warm Charity, the general friend, With Justice, to herself severe, And Pity, dropping soft the sadly-pleasing tear. O gently on thy suppliant's head, Dread goddess, lay thy chast'ning hand! Not circled with the vengeful band With thund'ring voice, and threat'ning mien, Thy form benign, O Goddess, wear, To soften, not to wound, my heart. Exact my own defects to scan, What others are to feel, and know myself a Man. This last stanza, where he gets free from the allegorical personages, is undoubtedly the best; and the curious couplet about the “ generous spark" seems to me to be probably a reference to the quarrel with Walpole. If this be thought fantastic, it must be remembered that Gray's circle of experience and emotion was unusually narrow. To return to the treatment of allegory and the peculiar style of this ode, we are confronted by the curious fact that it seems impossible to claim for these qualities, hitherto unobserved in English poetry, precedency in either Gray or Collins. Actual priority, of course, belongs to Gray, for Collins wrote nothing of a serious nature till 1745 or 1746; but his Odes, though so similar, or rather so analogous, to Gray's, that every critic has considered them as holding a distinct place together in literature, were certainly not in any way inspired by Gray. The latter published nothing till 1747, whereas in December, 1746, Collins' precious little volume saw the light. It is difficult to believe that Collins, at school at Winchester until 1741, at college at Oxford until 1744, could have seen any of Gray's verses, which had not then begun to circulate in MS., in the way in which long afterwards the Elegy and the Bard passed from eager hand to hand. We shall see that Gray read Collins eventually, but without interest, while Collins does not appear to have been ever conscious of Gray's existence; there was no mutual magnetic attraction between the two poets, and we must suppose their extraordinary kinship to have been a mere accident, the result of certain forces acting simultaneously on more or less similar intellectual compounds. There was no other resemblance between them, as men, than this one gift of clear, pure, Simonidean song. Collins was simply a reed, cut short and notched by the great god Pan, for the production of enchanting flutemelodies at intervals; but for all other human purposes a vain and empty thing indeed. In Gray the song, important as it was, seemed merely one phase of a deep and consistent character, of a brain almost universally accomplished, of a man, in short, and not of a mere musical instrument. One more work of great importance was begun at Stoke in the autumn of 1742, the Elegy wrote in a Country Church-Yard. It is, unfortunately, impossible to say what form it originally took, or what lines or thoughts now existing in it are part of the original scheme. We shall examine this poem at length when we F reach the period of Gray's career to which it belongs in its completed form; but as the question is often asked, and vaguely answered, where was the Elegy written, it may at once be said that it was begun at Stoke in October or November 1742, continued at Stoke immediately after the funeral of Gray's aunt, Miss Mary Antrobus, in November 1749, and finished at Cambridge in June 1750. And it may here be remarked as a very singular fact that the death of a valued friend seems to have been the stimulus of greatest efficacy in rousing Gray to the composition of poetry, and did in fact excite him to the completion of most of his important poems. He was a man who had a very slender hold on life himself, who walked habitually in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and whose periods of greatest vitality were those in which bereavement proved to him, that, melancholy as he was, even he had something to lose and to regret. It is therefore perhaps more than a strong impression that makes me conjecture the beginning of the Elegy wrote in a Country Church-Yard to date from the funeral of Gray's uncle, Jonathan Rogers, who died at StokePogis on the 31st of October, 1742, and who was buried with the Antrobus family in the church of the neighbouring parish of Burnham. An ingenious Latin inscription to him, in a marble tablet in the church of that name, has always been ascribed to Gray himself. Rogers died at the age of sixty-five, having spent thirty-two years in undisturbed felicity with his wife, born Anna Antrobus, who survived him till near the end of her celebrated nephew's life. The death of Mr. Rogers completely altered Gray's prospects. Mrs. Rogers appears to have been left with a very small fortune, just enough to sup port her and her sisters Mrs. Gray and Miss Antrobus, in genteel comfort, if they shared a house together, and had no extraneous expenses. The ladies from Cornhill accordingly came down to West End House at Stoke, and there the three sisters lived until their respective deaths. But Gray's dream of a life of lettered ease was at an end; he saw that what would support these ladies would leave but little margin for him. His temperament and his mode of study shut him out from every energetic profession. He was twenty-five years of age, and hitherto had not so much as begun any serious study of the law, for which his mother still imagined him to be preparing. Only one course was open to him, namely, to return to Cambridge, where living was very cheap, and to reside in college, spending his vacations quietly at Stoke Pogis. As Mason puts it, "he was too delicate to hurt two persons for whom he had so tender an affection, by peremptorily declaring his real intentions, and therefore changed, or pretended to change, the line of his study." Henceforward, until 1759, his whole life was a regular oscillation between Stoke and Cambridge, varied only by occasional visits to London. The first part of his life was now over. At twenty-five Gray becomes a middleaged man, and løses, among the libraries of the University, his last pretensions to physical elasticity. From this time forward we find that his ailments, his melancholy, his reserve, and his habit of drowning consciousness in perpetual study, have taken firm hold upon him, and he begins to plunge into an excess of reading, treating the acquisition of knowledge as a narcotic. In the winter of 1742 he proceeded to Peterhouse, and taking his bachelor's degree in Civil Law, was forthwith installed as a resident of that college. GRAY took up his abode at Peterhouse, in the room nearest the road on the second floor on the north side, a room which still exists and which commands a fine view of Pembroke College further east, on the opposite side of Trumpington Street. It would seem, indeed, that Gray's eyes and thoughts were for ever away from home, and paying a visit to the society across the road. His letters are full of minute discussions of what is going on at Pembroke, but never a word of Peterhouse; indeed so naturally and commonly does he discuss the politics of the former college, often without naming it, that all his biographers, except of course Mason, seem to have taken for granted that he was describing Peterhouse. Oddly enough, Mason, who might have explained this circumstance in half a dozen words, does not appear to have noticed the fact, so natural did it seem to him to read about events which went on in his own college of Pembroke. Nor is it explained why Gray never became a fellow of Peterhouse. In all the correspondence of Gray I have only noted one solitary instance in which he has mentioned a Petrusian; on this one occasion he does name the Master, J. Whalley, afterwards Bishop of Chester, in connexion with an anecdote which does more honour to him as a kind old |