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"Violets dim

And sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,
Or Cytherea's breath."

Violets dim, says one, from their light blue colour; from lying half concealed in their foliage, says another; as if the value of the word did not depend on the impossibility of conveying the idea in any other form, and as if it were not in itself untranslatable, inexplicable, and all in all sufficient for any mind worthy to read it. So we have

"Heaven's cherubim

Horsed on the sightless couriers of the air."

And even the self-controlled Milton speaks of

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Gray, as a poet, may be said to have studied words more carefully than the things they represent. He looked on a lay figure of nature. He had no thronging imaginations which required the vent of verse. He went abroad in search of ideas, and brought them home to amplify and adorn them. If the beauty of a word or a phrase struck him, he worked it into his general design as best he could he could not afford to omit it. His imagination was at once vivid and sterile. He possesses isolated passages of remarkable force and beauty, and never sinks below a certain level; but among the most remarkable characteristics of his mind, was an almost utter absence of creative or reproductive power, and an overpowering occupation with minutiæ. Nothing came from him spontaneously. "If I do not write much, it is because I cannot." His poetry was wrung out drop by drop, with an effort which soon became too great for his indolent nature. A life of moderate length sufficed only to produce a number of lines, which must be printed large to occupy thirty octavo pages, and from these six or seven must be deducted for translations.

His love of detail showed itself, not only in his minute attention to small points of criticism, but in the whole choice of his studies. In history, he was a chronologist and genealogist; in art, an antiquarian; and in natural history, devoted to nomenclature and the cataloguing of trivial observations. During the chief part of his life, he "kept a daily record of the blowing of flowers, the leafing of trees, the state of the thermometer, the quarter from which the wind blew, and the falling of rain; these he entered into his pocket journals, in his delicate and correct handwriting, with the utmost precision, and sometimes into a naturalist's calendar in addition." Mr. Mitford tells us :

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Gray's copy of Verral's Book of Cookery, 8vo, 1759, is in my possession, and is enriched by numerous notes in his writing, with his usual minute diligence, and remarks on culinary subjects, arranging the subjects of gastronomy in scientific order. 1st. List of furniture necessary for a kitchen, which he classes under twelve heads. 2dly. List of such receipts as are primarily necessary in forming essential ingredients for others, all accurately indexed to their respective pages. 3dly. Five pages of receipts for various dishes, with the names of the inventors."

It is this over-balanced interest in details, acting under the influence of a highly-refined apprehension of beauty and fitness, that constitutes the peculiarity of Gray's poetry. He is the master of polished diction. Each separate particle of his poems has often force and exquisite beauty, but always finished propriety and perfect fitness of parts; the choice of words is at once remote from sameness and from singularity; and the rhythm steers a delicate medium at once remote from a dead level of smoothness, and from any approach to ruggedness. We read each period with delight, and are contented to seek our satisfaction in the perfection of each isolated part, without caring to observe that they are artificially connected, and that the poem itself is weak and objectless. It is true that Gray's taste, though

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refined, is far from faultless, and was allowed too deliberate and cold-blooded a control over his imagination. Every phrase and every word was brought up for judgment, and condemned or accepted on grounds often too remote from the real conditions of the art. He made fancy fetch and carry for criticism, and fastened on his epithets like the spangles on an actor's dress. Yet it may be doubted whether his genius would have distinguished him apart from the nice perceptions of his taste. It may have been sometimes cramped by too arbitrary a control, but it scarcely possessed energy sufficient to be a law unto itself.

It is curious that, with his habits of mind, he should have become famous for obscurity of expression. It is a fact that can only be accounted for by the subordinate place he gave to sense compared with sound. He would at any time prefer to be incomprehensible rather than to repeat an epithet in the same poem. His allusions are sometimes too remote to be followed; at others, too general to be identified. The conclusion of the prophecy of the Bard affords a remarkable instance of the latter defect.

"The verse adorn again

Fierce War, and faithful Love,

And Truth severe, by fairy Fiction drest;

In buskined measures move

Pale Grief, and pleasing Pain,

With Horror, tyrant of the throbbing breast.

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."

Gray grudged his readers a note to inform them that pale Grief and pleasing Pain, moving in buskined measures, was a special reference to Shakspere, and that the voice, as of a cherub-choir borne from Eden, was that of Milton. In default of such information, fierce War, if it is to embody a like specific allusion, may

mean any body, from Fairfax to Marlborough, and Truth severe by fairy Fiction drest, may allude to the Fairy Queen or Rasselas, or any intermediate composition that answers to this wide description. That, in his secret heart, he was aware of the obscurity of some of his allusions and (though he makes a joke of it) that he was not entirely displeased at the idea that it should require learning to appreciate him, appears in a passage of one of his letters to Walpole: "I don't know but I may send him [Dodsley] very soon (by your hands) an ode to his own tooth, a high Pindaric upon stilts, which one must be a better scholar than he is to understand a line of, and the very best scholars will understand but a little matter here and there. It wants but seventeen lines of having an end. I don't say of being finished." This seems to be an allusion to his ode on the Progress of Poetry, on which one of his critics sententiously observes, that "being one of those that are willing to be pleased, he would therefore gladly find the meaning of the first stanza."

The peculiar trait of his fancy is to use allegory for the purposes of metaphor, and he pushes his personification so far, that the original meaning is often lost by the complete occupation of the reader's mind with the substituted image. A poet with a true instinct, however vivid may be the personality he assumes for inanimate objects, softens his image into unison with the actual impression he wishes to convey, by the vagueness of the accompanying conceptions playing upon the borders of the real and the assumed, and mingling the shades of metaphor and description. So Milton tells us that the moon,

"Apparent Queen, unveiled her peerless light,

And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw."

Gray would have said she unveiled her peerless face, and clothed the form of Darkness in her silver mantle, or otherwise have conveyed the impression of a black

man in a white cloak. He constantly has such images Gay Hope by Fancy fed," which suggests spoonmeat irresistibly.

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But it is easier to find defects in Gray's poems than to deny the attraction they possess both for the popular and the cultivated mind. He cannot be said to have had a great imagination, but the strength and vividness of his fancy were remarkable, and his inspirations, though rare, flashed forth with vigour when they did come. His mode of speaking of these visits is worth noting, as embodying a truth to which, we suppose, every real and self-observant poet would be a witness. "I by no means pretend to inspiration; but yet I affirm that the faculty in question is by no means voluntary; it is the result (I suppose) of a certain disposition of mind which does not depend on oneself, and which I have not felt this long time. You, that are a witness how seldom this spirit has moved me in my life, may give credit to what I say." Hereupon, the matter-offact Dr. Johnson, who made poetry by pure effort of diligence, as a man casts up his ledger, observes: "He had a notion, not very peculiar, that he could not write, but at certain times, or at happy moments, a fantastic foppery, to which my kindness for a man of learning and virtue wishes him to have been superior."

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