and commentators in tracing epithets, thoughts, images, to possible sources, ancient and modern. The lines of his are few which do not trail around them clouds of gold and purple dust, the essence of a hundred libraries. It might be the service of rosy-crowned Loves and Graces to their Mistress:

Now in circling troops they meet;

To brisk notes in cadence beating,
Glance their many-twinkling feet.

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

The bloom of young Desire and purple light of Love.2

Virgil and Ovid, even Apuleius, even one Barton Booth, are supposed to have been laid under contribution for the divine mode in which Venus and her Loves dance, for the tint of the impassioned air. When the Muse's track,

where'er the goddess roves,

Glory pursue, and gen'rous Shame,

Th' unconquerable Mind, and freedom's holy flame,3

Pindar has to be vouched in defence of the liberty poetry has taken with the number of a verb. So are half a dozen other authorities on behalf of phrases in the magnificent anthem saluting the descent of Shakespeare's laurel crown successively to Milton and Dryden :

Nor second He, that rode sublime
Upon the seraph-wings of Extasy,

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,

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,

With necks in thunder cloth'd, and long-resounding pace.

Hark, his hands the lyre explore!

Bright-eyed Fancy, hov'ring o'er,
Scatters from her pictur'd urn

Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

But ah! 'tis heard no more

The lurid splendours of The Bard are equally provided with defences and parallels, new and old; for the aspect of the seer, as :

Robed 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-
And with a master's hand, and prophet's fire,
Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre; 5

for the dirge over his murdered fellows in song; and for his exultation at the vengeance preparing for the victor and his line:

'Weave the warp, and weave the woof,
The winding-sheet of Edward's race.
Give ample room, and verge enough

The characters of hell to trace.

Mark the year, and mark the night,

When Severn shall re-echo with affright

The shrieks of death, thro' Berkley's roof that ring,

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 heav'n. What terrors round him wait!
Amazement in his van, with flight combin❜d,
And sorrow's faded form, and solitude behind.'

Verse like that was strong enough to need no borrowed light from older classics, or excuse for having 'conveyed' words or suggestions from them. It shines apart and independently, like a Play by Shakespeare, whencesoever he may have taken the plot. To apologize, however, was not Gray's intention. He did not regard a debt to Pindar or Callimachus, Lucretius, or Virgil, as derogatory, or as plagiarism. At all times he preferred fame for learning to fame for verse. I am not sure but that he agreed with Elizabethans in being a little ashamed of the name of poet, while he loved a poet's inspiration. In any case, as soon as nature, a poet's genius, had supplied the motive and basis of a piece, he would set to work as scholar-artist to polish and complete. We become impatient at the exquisite elaboration. Under it grand thoughts run a danger of being buried. There are degrees. Moments of quiet occur; in the footnotes, for example, to the Ode to Adversity:

When first thy sire to send on earth
Virtue, his darling child, design'd,
To thee he gave the heav'nly birth,
And bade to form her infant mind.
Stern rugged nurse! thy rigid lore
With patience many a year she bore;

What sorrow was thou bad'st her know,

And from her own she learn'd to melt at others' woe.?

In The Progress of Poesy, we sigh in vain for the linked golden chain of pageantry to be let without comment coil gloriously along. It is mere vexation to have a halt called at every other line that we may admire some exquisite inlay from kindred inspiration in the past.

It is a pardonable regret. A poet, however, has to be accepted as he is; and we recognize that Gray is an amalgam of art and nature. More apparent in The Bard,

The Progress of Poesy, the Ode for Music, the art is felt shaping, if less obtrusively, also the lamentations for departed boyhood, fleeting Spring, and pensive Selima's unfortunate absence of aversion to fish. Its handiwork is visible in the unfinished tragedy of Agrippina, in didactics on Education and Government which stirred the enthusiasm of Gibbon, in translations from Eddas or Aneurin, and in sarcasms hurled at a Sandwich or a Holland. We almost see a fragment like the Ode on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitude waiting in tremulous, smiling suspense to be informed whence its original beauties had their being, and for the lingering, loving pen to star it all over with other lines as luminous as the description of a convalescent's surprised delight in everyday life :

An infinite capacity for taking pains has been alleged to be identical with genius. I doubt the universality of the rule. The combination is true at all events of Gray, whose genius is indisputable. So is his refinement, almost superstition, in the improvement and embellishment of his verse. It is open and manifest everywhere-except in the Elegy.

The rest of his poems in any case must have lived, and been applauded. Hardly would they have been loved. As a theme, the Elegy was an accident of inspiration. Accident, if that can be so called which selects merit for its object and rewards it, tells in literature, as well as in the start of millionaires and lawyers. Never was there a happier chance than that which directed Gray's steps to the Buckinghamshire churchyard when the poetic fit was upon him. Without the six-score lines of the Elegy it

would have been impossible to discover the reserve in him of native tenderness. His wealth of imagination and learning, his fire, his wit and humour, could not have been hidden or slighted. But posterity would not have known of the poet of humanity, of the soul capable of a world-poem! Great though the loss, we might do without The Progress of Poesy, and The Bard; but imagine, if imagination can, the English race without Gray's Elegy! I do not wonder at Wolfe's exclamation. British history could less well spare the poem than the victory on the Heights of Abraham.

The Elegy was the protest of the natural in Gray against the pedantry of his age, its affectation of a stilted reasonableness, allied with an unwholesome appetite for rhetoric, its as unhealthy cynicism, its insensibility to simple emotions-against, perhaps, strong tendencies in himself. It is a revelation to posterity, perhaps to its writer as well, of an opposing ingredient in his own inner being of common, unbrocaded human kindliness and pathos. I have tried to resist but cannot-the temptation to quote in proof, though I feel that, if I quote for that purpose at all, I ought to quote the whole :

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.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,

The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

Perhaps, in this neglected spot, is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
Or wak'd to extasy the living lyre;