Grays

“ There is no purer prose in existence; there is not much that is so pure. But the crowning glory of Gray's nature, the element that makes it so impressive, the charm that brings the pilgrim to Stoke-Pogis church to muse upon it, was the self-poised, sincere, and lovely exaltation of its contemplative spirit. ”

“ Thomas Gray.
You will know of that first poem of his—Ode to Eton College; at least you know its terminal lines, which are cited on all the high-roads:—
"Where ignorance is bliss
'Tis folly to be wise!"
All the world knows, too, his Elegy, on which his fame principally rests. Its melancholy music gets somehow stamped on the brain of nearly all of us, and lends a poetic halo to every old graveyard that has the shadow of a church tower slanted over it.
Gray [14] was, like Milton, a London boy—born on Cornhill under the shadow almost of St. Paul's. ”

“ That was to be for the time, by every indication, his amusing "line"—his taking so confident and insistent a view of what it must be in Gray's nature and tradition to like or not to like that, as our young man for that matter himself assured him, he couldn't have invented a more successfully insidious way of creating an appetite than by passing under a fellow's nose every sort of whiff of the indigestible. ”

“ Gray has expressed a simple sentiment, and as long as there are young men and middle-aged men, Gray’s poem will continue to be read and loved as in the days when it was written. There is a Spanish proverb which rebukes those people who ask something better than bread. Let those who ask for something better get something better than what Gray produced. For my own part I ask nothing better. He was, perhaps, the greatest artist in words that English [Pg 31] literature has possessed. ”

“ Gray went on, "I don't in the least judge that I am, or can be at all advertised as, one of the really big. You seem all here so hideously rich that I needn't fear to count as extraordinary; indeed I'm very competently assured I'm by all your standards a very moderate affair. And even if I were a much greater one"—he gathered force—"my appearance of it would depend only on myself. You can have means and not be blatant; you can take up, by the very fact itself, if you happen to be decent, no more room than may suit your taste. ”

“ He is beyond, he is outside of, all moral judgments, all scandalised states; he is amused at what he himself does, at his general and particular effect and effects on Gray, who is his luxury of a relation, as it were, and whom I somehow seem to want to show him feel as the only person in the whole medium appreciating his genius; in other words his detached play of mind and the deep "American humour" of it. Don't I seem to want him even as asking for something rather big?—a kind of a lump of a sum which Gray, always with amusement, answers that he will have to see about. ”

“ Here, we are told, lies the secret of Gray's limitation as much in life as in literature: so sensitive was he in private life, so modest in public, that the thoughts that arose in him never got full utterance, the possibilities of his genius were never fulfilled; and we, in our turn, are left the poorer for that nervous delicacy which has proved the bane of the poet, living and dead alike. ”

“ No one heard him, no one knew he was there; but as he stood in the silence and darkness he heard distinctly his grandfather's voice, and this was what he heard:
"I must tell you, my son, and you, my minister; but no one else, not Grey—no, no, not, the boy Grey, who loves me so much. His life must not be shadowed with disgrace. He must not hate me in my coffin. Oh, Grey! Grey! May God bless him and give him every needful happiness, and make him so good and noble that his life will blot out the stain upon our name." ”

“ Gray was an author of great pretensions, but of great merit. He has an air of sublimity, if not the reality. He aims at the highest things; and if he fails, it is only by a hair’s-breadth. His pathos is injured, like his sublimity, by too great an ambition after the ornaments and machinery of poetry. His craving after foreign help perhaps shows the want of the internal impulse. His Elegy in a Country Churchyard, which is the most simple, is the best of his productions. ”

“ As Gray looked up he could only distinguish the vague dark outlines of the gloomy hills. A thousand men might have been hidden in the hollows and he would have been none the wiser. He listened intently, but there was no sound of human life. The wind had fallen, and the rush of the stream at the bottom of the ravine was the only sound that struck his ear. ”

“ Gray was not one. Whether in the country churchyard, or by the grave of Horace Walpole's favourite cat, he never lost hold of himself, never let heart take whip and reins, never drowned the scholar in the poet, never, in fact, showed himself in his shirtsleeves. But before he was dead the hearts of men began to cry again. Forty years before Gray died Cowper was born; fourteen years before he died, Blake was born; twelve years before he died, Burns. ”

“ It was possible that the first prints they had seen were those of one of their enemies, and that this man had carried the news of their coming to his companions. It would have been easy for the men of the camel feet—as Gray thought of them—to trail his party without being seen among the dunes. Or else, they might have been following Sir Lionel. ”

“ It happened that Gray, in the confusion of his mind, did not at all take into consideration that the sloping roof might have a side to descend as well as one to ascend, so that when he arrived at its summit, he rolled over and came down with great speed into a gutter on the other side, and partially upon the back of his guide, who, with a muttered accusation of an awful character, seized him by the throat and held down, in the gutter upon his back to the imminent risk of his strangulation. ”

“ Say even if it doesn't take, or didn't, too much exhibition or insistence, that the meeting has been with the stepfather only, who has talked with her about Gray, made a point of Gray, wished she could know Gray, excited her interest and prepared her encounter for Gray, in some conditions in which Gray has been temporarily absent from him. ”

“ From time to time, as the light flickered upon the striking face in the ingle, Grey caught a fine-lipped smile upon it, and once or twice he thought the old actor's eyes met his in a gleam of humour. But of that he could not be sure—it might be but the trick of the firelight; and presently wearied nature asserted itself, and the young man passed from drowsiness to actual sleep, and knew nothing more till a sharp grip upon his arm roused him to a sense of his surroundings.
It was the tapster who thus shook him; and when he opened his eyes, Grey saw—or thought, at least—that the room was empty. ”

“ Mason whom Gray described, a little before this offer, as repining at his four and twenty weeks residence at York, and longing for the flesh-pots and coffee-houses of Cambridge, was notwithstanding in his friend and fellow-poet's phrase, a long while mariturient, “and praying to heaven to give him a good and gentle governess.” “No man,” says Gray, “wants such a thing more in all senses; but his greatest wants do not make him move a foot faster, nor has he, properly speaking, any thing one can call a passion about him, except a little malice and revenge.” ”

“ The “Elegy” is one of the most celebrated poems ever written. It was begun when Gray was twenty-six years old, but he did not{83} finish it until eight years later. Its fame spread over the world, and it still holds its rank as the most perfect of English poems.
The poet lived at Cambridge, where he devoted his time to study. The “Elegy” and a later work, “The Bard,” placed him at the head of English poets. He was offered the office of poet laureate, which he refused.
In 1768 Gray accepted the chair of Modern History and Languages at Cambridge. ”

“ Gray introduced him to society; [15] and, one of the professors having asked him if he understood what he said, he replied he thought so, but very diff [idently?] —"So you think so only!" Gray, hearing this, showed B [onstetten] some passages to ask him, which B [onstetten] did in a public company, complimenting him upon [his?] known knowledge; when all the company, one after the other, began contradicting the Professor's opinion. Then B [onstetten] , turning to him, said, "You perhaps thought you understood Shakespear." ”

“ Gray, the Poet, followed: he died soon after his forlorn and melancholy pilgrimage to the Vale of Keswick, and the record left behind him of {270} what he had seen and felt in this journey, excited that pensive interest with which the human mind is ever disposed to listen to the farewell words of a man of genius. The journal of Gray feelingly showed how the gloom of ill health and low spirits had been irradiated by objects, which the Author's powers of mind enabled him to describe with distinctness and unaffected simplicity. ”

“ A moment passed while Gray silently cursed the heavy breathing of Delabar who seemed possessed by uncontrollable excitement. Then a shaven head appeared in the doorway, followed by a naked shoulder. A pair of slant, evil eyes flickered around the gallery, failing to notice the two white men in the shadow.
Gray's hand went out and closed on the throat of the priest. His grip tightened, choking off a smothered gasp. The man fell heavily to his knees.
The floor echoed dully at the impact. Gray realized that it must have been heard by those in the temple below. ”

“ Gray again; "I am not accustomed to be interrupted when I am endeavouring to awaken a hardened conscience to a sense of its condition, and I will not be now. And I call upon you at this time—now is the accepted time, sir, now is the day of salvation—to amend, amend, amend! You have been a spendthrift, profligate, everything that is bad; you have studied yourself in every action of life, and neglected the common duties due to your neighbour as well as to your Maker. ”

“ Gray was born in London; his father possessed property, but was indolent and selfish; his mother was a successful woman of business, and supported her son in college from her own earnings. The poet was educated at Eton and Cambridge; at the latter place, he resided for several years after his return from a continental tour, begun in 1739. He was small and delicate in person, refined and precise in dress and manners, and shy and retiring in disposition. He was an accomplished scholar in many fields of learning, but left comparatively little finished work in any department. ”

“ I Grey’s awakening was as gradual as a clouded dawn. For a time dreams and realities intermingled. Then slowly a partial consciousness of his physical being obtruded: his fingers were clutching a silken coverlet; he turned on his side and the linen pillow-case was cool to his cheek; through half-open eyelids a sweep of pale blue became visible. Later he realised that he was in a curtained bed and that the blue was the colour of the draperies. He lay still for a long while—drowsy, inert, his sensibilities numb. Presently the ticking of a clock became audible, and then a rumble of street sounds. ”

“ Gray, who, after joining the church, became an active worker in some of the public and prominent charities of the day. He contributed liberally in many cases, and gave a good deal of time to the prosecution of benevolent enterprises, in which men of some position were concerned. ”

“ Whether wife or mistress, Gray felt she was lost to him, and he sat down again upon the bank of leaves, till the shadows of the old elms stretched themselves out like giants on the meadow-grass, and the song of the reapers mingled with the hum of voices in the village; then he rose, buckled on his knapsack, and made his way through many well-remembered paths, past the old school-house, to the garden-gate opening upon his father’s little property.
Again he trod the well-remembered path, again he lifted up the latch, and, as he had hoped and expected, found old Margaret by the fire ”

“ In the case of poets, literary men, and artists, the influence of the mother's feeling and taste has doubtless had great effect in directing the genius of their sons; and we find this especially illustrated in the lives of Gray, Thomson, Scott, Southey, Bulwer, Schiller, and Goethe. Gray inherited, almost complete, his kind and loving nature from his mother, while his father was harsh and unamiable. Gray was, in fact, a feminine man—shy, reserved, and wanting in energy,—but thoroughly irreproachable in life and character. ”

“ Gray yields to the impulse of the Romantic movement; he has long been an admirer of ballad poetry; before he wrote “The Bard” he had begun to study Scandinavian literature, and the two “Norse Odes,” written in 1761, were in style and metrical form strangely anticipative of Coleridge and Scott. Meanwhile his Cambridge life had been vexed by the freaks of the fellow-commoners of Peterhouse, a peculiarly riotous set. ”

“ These words were spoken by Gray in a tone of great mental anguish, and he passed on silently to his own chamber.
A silence, as of the grave, reigned over the old house, and an uneasy slumber crept over Jacob Gray.
Well might the man of crime dread to sleep; for, although exhausted nature sunk into repose, the busy fancy slept not; but, ever wakeful, conjured up strange ghastly shapes to scare the sleeper. ”

“ Na, na, Mr Gray, ye’re a’ out there; there is no ane in the parish would hear an ill word o’ Simon.—But ye’re an auld man, sir, and set an evil example to others.—Ne’er a ane do I set an evil example to but yoursel, Mr Gray; and for a’ your cant about sobriety, ye take your drams as regularly as I do; and I defy you—I defy you or ony other man to say ye e’er saw me the waur o’ liquor in your life. Besides, Mr Gray, the progress of human life is like a journey from the equator to the north pole. ”