-And then, my dear, I can't abide,
This always sauntering side by side.'
'Enough,' he cries; the reason's plain :
For causes never rack your brain.
Our neighbours are like other folks ;
Skip's playful tricks, and Jenny's jokes,
Are still delightful, still would please,
Were we, my dear, ourselves at ease.
Look round, with an impartial eye,
On yonder fields, on yonder sky;
The azure cope, the flowers below,
With all their wonted colours glow;
The rill still murmurs; and the moon
Shines, as she did, a softer sun.

No change has made the seasons fail,
No comet brushed us with his tail.

The scene's the same, the same the weather-
We live, my dear, too much together.'

Agreed. A rich old uncle dies,
And added wealth the means supplies.
With eager haste to town they flew,
Where all must please, for all was new.

Advanced to fashion's wavering head,
They now, where once they followed, led;
Devised new systems of delight,
Abed all day, and up all night,

In different circles reigned supreme;
Wives copied her, and husbands him;
Till so divinely life ran on,
So separate, so quite bon-ton,
That, meeting in a public place,

They scarcely knew each other's face.
At last they met, by his desire,
A tête-à-tête across the fire;
Looked in each other's face a while,
With half a tear, and half a smile.
The ruddy health, which wont to grace
With manly glow his rural face,
Now scarce retained its faintest streak,
So sallow was his leathern cheek.
She, lank and pale, and hollow-eyed,
With rouge had striven in vain to hide
What once was beauty, and repair
The rapine of the midnight air.

Silence is eloquence, 'tis said.

Both wished to speak, both hung the head.
At length it burst. 'Tis time,' he cries,

"True to the bias of our kind, 'Tis happiness we wish to find. In rural scenes retired we sought In vain the dear, delicious draught, Though blest with love's indulgent store, We found we wanted something more. 'Twas company, 'twas friends to share The bliss we languished to declare; 'Twas social converse, change of scene, To soothe the sullen hour of spleen; Short absences to wake desire, And sweet regrets to fan the fire.

'We left the lonesome place, and found,

In dissipation's giddy round,

A thousand novelties to wake

The springs of life, and not to break.

As, from the nest not wandering far,
In light excursions through the air,
The feathered tenants of the grove
Around in mazy circles move,

Sip the cool springs that murmuring flow,
Or taste the blossom on the bough;
We sported freely with the rest;
And still, returning to the nest,
In easy mirth we chatter'd o'er
The trifles of the day before.

'Behold us now, dissolving quite
In the full ocean of delight;
In pleasures every hour employ,
Immersed in all the world calls joy;
Our affluence easing the expense
Of splendour and magnificence;
Our company, the exalted set

Of all that's gay, and all that's great:
Nor happy yet! and where's the wonder!
We live, my dear, too much asunder!'
The moral of my tale is this:
Variety 's the soul of bliss;

But such variety alone

As makes our home the more our own.
As from the heart's impelling power
The life-blood pours its genial store;
Though taking each a various way,
The active streams meandering play
Through every artery, every vein,
All to the heart return again;
From thence resume their new career,
But still return and centre there;

So real happiness below

Must from the heart sincerely flow;
Nor, listening to the siren's song,
Must stray too far, or rest too long.
All human pleasures thither tend;
Must there begin, and there must end;
Must there recruit their languid force,
And gain fresh vigour from their source.

James Harris of Salisbury (1709-80) was a man of rank and fortune; he was educated at Wadham, Oxford, sat several years in Parliament, and was successively a Lord of the Admiralty and Lord of the Treasury. In 1774 he was made secretary and comptroller to the queen, and these posts he held till his death in 1780. In 1744 he published three treatises on art, on music and painting, and on happiness; and in 1751 produced his celebrated Hermes, or a Philosophical Inquiry concerning Universal Grammar. The work is an elaborate attempt to discover the inevitable basis of all grammatical forms from an analysis of the thoughts to be conveyed. The method is impossible, and the results false and useless; but Harris's varied learning and ingenuity enabled him to produce a curious and interesting book. He clung to Aristotle in the reign of Locke, and his Philosophical Arrangements (1775) treats modern problems by Aristotelian methods. Philological Inquiries (1781), the least tedious of his works, is on style and literary criticism. His son, Lord Malmesbury, published in 1801 a complete edition of his works in two quarto volumes.

Thomas Gray was born at Cornhill in London, 26th December 1716. His father, Philip Gray (a money-scrivener, like Milton's father), was a 'respectable citizen,' but a man of harsh and violent disposition. His wife was forced to separate from him; and it was to her exertions as partner with her sister in a millinery business that the poet owed the advantages of a learned education, first at Eton and afterwards at Peterhouse, Cambridge. The painful domestic circumstances of his youth doubtless helped to develop the melancholy traceable in his poetry. At Eton he had made the friendship of Horace Walpole, son of the Prime Minister; and when his college education was completed, Walpole carried him off as companion on a tour through France and Italy. They had been two years and a half together, exploring the natural beauties, antiquities, and picture-galleries of Florence, Rome, and Naples, when a quarrel took place at Reggio, and the travellers separated, Gray returning to England. Walpole took the blame of this difference on himself, as he was vain and volatile, and not disposed to trust in the better knowledge or fall in with the somewhat fastidious tastes and habits of his associate; and by his repentant efforts the breach was healed within three years. Gray went to Cambridge to take his degree in civil law, but without intending to follow up the profession. His father had died, his mother's means were small, and the poet was more intent on learning than on riches. He made his home in Cambridge, and amidst its noble libraries and learned society passed the greater part of his remaining life. Heartily hating mathematics, he was ardently devoted to classical learning, belleslettres, architecture, antiquities, heraldry, and natural history (especially botany and entomology); he rejoiced in voyages, travels, and books on geography, and showed good taste in painting, music, and gardening. His friend Temple said he 'was perhaps the most learned man in Europe ;' and his chief relaxation was sought in pleasant company and in writing letters-letters such as only that age could produce. This retired life was varied by occasional residence in London, where he revelled among the treasures of the British Museum; and by frequent excursions to the country on visits to learned and attached friends. At Cambridge, Gray was considered an unduly fastidious man, and this and the fact that he had a nervous horror of fire gave occasion to practical jokes being played on him by his fellow-inmates of Peterhouse. One of these-a false alarm of fire, by which he was induced to climb down from his window to the ground by a rope-so annoyed him that he moved (1756) to Pembroke Hall. In 1765 he made a journey into Scotland, and met Beattie at Glamis Castle. Wales too he visited, and Cumberland and Westmorland, for the lakes' sake. His letters describing

these excursions are remarkable for their grace, acute observation, and dry scholastic humour, as well as for insight into the picturesque and a joy in mountain scenery till then extremely rare-though John Brown (see page 392) and 'Jupiter' Carlyle still earlier visited the Lakes as 'celebrated.' Mackintosh said Gray 'was the first discoverer of the beauties of nature in England.' After these unexciting holidays Gray re-established himself in his college retreat-pored over his favourite authors, compiled tables of chronology or botany, moralised 'on all he felt and all he saw' in correspondence with his friends, and occasionally ventured into the realms of poetry and imagination. He had studied the Greek poets with such devotion and care that their spirit informed all his work.

Gray's first public appearance as a poet was made in 1747, when his Ode to Eton College was published by Dodsley; it had, however, been written in 1742, as also the Ode to Spring. In 1751 his Elegy written in a Country Churchyard secured an enthusiastic hearing. His Pindaric Odes, written in 1750-57, met with small success; but his name was now so well known that he was offered the laureateship (1757), vacant by the death of Colley Cibber. This he declined; but in 1768 he accepted the more important post of Professor of Modern History, which brought him in about £400 per annum. In 1760-61 he devoted himself to early English poetry; later he studied Icelandic and Celtic poetry, which bore fruit in his Eddaic poems, The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin -authentic precursors of Romanticism. For some years he had been subject to hereditary gout as well as to depression of spirits, and as his circumstances improved his health declined. While at dinner one day in the college-hall he was seized with severe illness, and after six days of suffering he died on the 30th of July 1771. By his own wish he was buried by the side of his mother at Stoke Poges near Windsor, and thus another poetic association was added to that beautiful scene of the Elegy. His epitaph on his mother has an interesting touch of his peculiar melancholy: 'Dorothy Gray, widow, the careful, tender mother of many children, one of whom alone had the misfortune to survive her.'

The poetry of Gray is all comprised in a few pages-surprisingly few; yet he was very soon accounted worthy to rank in the first order of poets, to be reverenced as one of the dii majores of English poetry. He still stands in the front rank of the second order. His two great odes, the Progress of Poesy and The Bard, published in 1757, are amongst the finest things we have in the socalled Pindaric style; his stanzas, in their varied versification, flow with lyrical ease and perfect harmony. Gray said of his own verse that the 'style he aimed at was extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical ;' and it has been generally agreed that he attained his ambition, especially in lyrical work such as

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

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

Elegy show the same careful and elaborate finish; but the thought is simpler and more touching. In a letter to Beattie, Gray says: As to description, I have always thought that it made the most graceful ornament of poetry, but never ought to make the sub

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

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

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

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

did Coleridge; so

did Mrs Browning. But it is surely by a temporary aberration of the Zeitgeist, by a too violent reaction against earlier overpraise, that recent anthologists such as Mr Henley and Mrs Meynell wholly omit Gray's verses, and either implicitly or explicitly deny his claim to be a true poet. Mrs Meynell even denounces him as

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

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

He was

In Gray's character there were odd inconsistencies. He was nice, reserved, and proud—a haughty, retired scholar; yet we find him in his letters full of English idiom and English feeling, with a spice of the gossip, sometimes not over-fastidious in his allusions. indolent, yet a severe student-hating Cambridge and its college discipline, yet constantly residing there. He loved intellectual ease and luxury, and wished, as in a sort of Mohammedan paradise, to lie on a sofa, and read eternal new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon.' All he could say of Thomson's Castle of Indolence when it was first published was that there were some good verses in it. He had studied in the school of the ancient and Italian poets, labouring like an artist to infuse part of their spirit, their melody, and even some of their expressions, into his own English verse; while as a Latin versifier he ranks among the best of his countrymen. In his country tours the poet carried with him a convex mirror for gathering into one spot the forms and tints of the surrounding landscape. His imagination performed a like service in fixing for a moment the materials of poetry. Despite his classic taste and models, Gray was among the first to welcome and admire the Celtic or pseudo-Celtic strains of Macpherson's Ossian; and he could also delight in the stern superstitions of the Scandinavian nations; in translating from the Norse tongue the Fatal Sisters and the Descent of Odin, he revived the rude energy and abruptness of the ancient ballad minstrels. In different circumstances his genius would doubtless have soared higher and taken a wider sweep. Mr Arnold explains what is sometimes called his 'sterility' by the fact that he was born a genuine poet into the age of prose, and could never breathe its atmosphere freely. For the place of Gray and Collins in the movement of the century, see above at page 11.

In a

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

The Advantages of Travel.

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

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

Netley Abbey.

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

P.S.-I must not close my letter without giving you one principal event of my history, which was thatin the course of my late tour-I set out one morning before five o'clock, the moon shining through a dark and misty autumnal air, and got to the sea-coast time enough to be at the sun's levee. I saw the clouds and dark vapours open gradually to right and left, rolling over one another in great smoky wreaths, and the tide -as it flowed gently in upon the sands-first whitening, then slightly tinged with gold and blue; and all at once a little line of insufferable brightness that-before I can write these five words5-was grown to half an orb, and now to a whole one, too glorious to be distinctly seen. It is very odd it makes no figure on paper; yet I shall

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

Grasmere.

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

The Grande Chartreuse.

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

treuse.

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

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

(From a Letter to his Mother.)

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

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