End House, a simple farmstead of two stories, with a rustic porch before the front door, and this was Gray's home for many years. It is now thoroughly altered and enlarged, and no longer contains any mark of its original simplicity. The charm of the house to the poet must have been that Burnham Beeches, Stoke Common, and Brockhurst Woods, were all at hand, and within reach of the most indolent of pedestrians.

Gray had been resident but very few days at Stoke-Pogis before he wrote the poem with which his poetical works usually open, his Ode to Spring. Among the MS. at Pembroke there occurs a copy of this poem, in Gray's handwriting, entitled Noon-Tide: an Ode; and in the margin of it there is found this interesting note: "The beginning of June, 1742, sent to Fav: not knowing he was then dead." Favonius was the familiar name of West, and this shows that Gray received no intimation of his friend's approaching end, and no summons to his bedside. The loss of West was one of the most profound that his reserved nature ever suffered; when that name was mentioned to him, nearly thirty years afterwards, he became visibly agitated, and to the end of his life he seemed to feel in the death of West "the affliction of a recent loss." We are therefore not surprised to find the Ode to Spring, which belongs to a previous condition of things, lighter in tone, colder in sentiment, and more trivial in conception than his other serious productions. We are annoyed that, in the very outset, he should borrow from Milton his "rosy-bosomed Hours," and from Pope his "purple year." Again there is a perplexing change of tone from the beginning where he was perhaps inspired by that exquisite strain of florid fancy, the Pervigilium Veneris, to the stoic moralizings of the later stanzas:

How vain the ardour of the crowd,

How low, how little are the proud,
How indigent the great!

It may be noted, by the way, that for many years the last two adjectives, now so happily placed, were awkwardly transposed. The best stanza, without doubt, is the penultimate :

To Contemplation's sober eye

Such is the race of Man :

And they that creep and they that fly
Shall end where they began.

Alike the Busy and the Gay

But flutter through life's little day,

In Fortune's varying colours drest:
Brush'd by the hand of rough Mischance
Or chill'd by Age, their airy dance

They leave, in dust to rest.

The final stanza, with its "glittering female," and its "painted plumage" is puerile in its attempted excess of simplicity, and errs, though in more fantastic language, exactly as such crude studies of Wordsworth's as Andrew Jones or The Two Thieves erred half a century later. Nothing was gained by the poet's describing himself "a solitary fly" without a hive to go to. The mistake was one which Gray never repeated, but it is curious to find two of the most sublime poets in our language, both specially eminent for loftiness of idea, beginning by eschewing all reasonable dignity of expression.

But although the Ode to Spring no longer forms a favourite part of Gray's poetical works, it possessed considerable significance in 1742, and particularly on account of its form. It was the first note of protest against the hard versification which had reigned in England for more

than sixty years. The Augustan age seems to have suffered from a dulness of ear, which did not permit it to detect a rhyme unless it rang at the close of the very next pause. Hence, in the rare cases where a lyric movement was employed, the ordinary octosyllabic couplet took the place of those versatile measures in which the Elizabethan and Jacobite poets had delighted, Swift, Lady Winchilsea, Parnell, Philips, and Green, the five poets of the beginning of the eighteenth century who rebelled against heroic verse, got no further in metrical innovation than the shorter and more ambling couplet. .Dyer, in his greatly overrated piece called Grongar Hill, followed these his predecessors. But Gray, from the very first, showed a disposition to return to more national forms, and to work out his stanzas on a more harmonic principle. He seems to have disliked the facility of the couplet, and the vague length to which it might be repeated. His view of a poem was that it should have a vertebrate form, which should respond, if not absolutely to its subject, at least to its mood. In short he was a genuine lyrist, and our literature had possessed none since Milton and the last cavalier song-writers. Yet his stanzas are built up from very simple materials. Here, in the Ode to Spring, we begin with a quatrain of the common ballad-measures; an octosyllabic couplet is added, and this would close it with a rustic effect, were the music not prolonged by the addition of three lines more, while the stanza closes gravely with a short line of six syllables.

The news of the death of West deepened Gray's vein of poetry, but did not stop its flow. He poured forth his grief and affection in some impassioned hexameters, full of earnest feeling, which he afterwards tried, ineptly enough, to tack on to the icy periods of his De Principiis

Cogitandi. In no other of his writings does Gray employ quite the same personal and emotional accents, in none does he speak out so plainly from the heart, and with so little attention to his singing robes :

Vidi egomet duro graviter concussa dolore
Pectora, in alterius non unquam lenta dolorem ;
Et languere oculos vidi, et pallescere amantem
Vultum, quo nunquam Pietas nisi rara, Fidesque,
Altus amor Veri, et purum spirabat Honestum.
Visa tamen tardi demum inclementia morbi
Cessere est, reducemque iterum roseo ore Salutem
Speravi, atque una tecum, dilecte Favoni!

Credulus heu longos, ut quondam, fallere Soles.

This fragment, the most attractive of his Latin poems, trips on a tag from Propertius, and suddenly ceases, nor is there extant any later effusion of Gray's in the same language. He celebrated the death of Favonius in another piece, which is far more familiar to general readers. The MS. of this sonnet, now at Cambridge, is marked "at Stoke: Aug. 1742;" it was not published till Mason included it in his Memoirs.

In vain to me the smiling mornings shine.
And reddening Phœbus lifts his golden fire:
The birds in vain their amorous descant join,
Or cheerful fields resume their green attire:
These ears alas! for other notes repine,

A different object do these eyes require;
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine,
And in my breast th' imperfect joys expire.
Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,
And new-born pleasure brings to happier men;
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;

To warm their little loves the birds complain;
I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,
And weep the more, because I weep in vain.

This little composition has suffered a sort of notoriety

from the fact that Wordsworth, in 1800, selected it as an example of the errors of an ornate style, doing so because, as he frankly admitted, "Gray stands at the head of those who by their reasonings have attempted to widen the space of separation betwixt Prose and Metrical composition, and was more than any other man curiously elaborate in the structure of his own poetic diction." Wordsworth declares that out of the fourteen lines of this poem only five are of any value, namely the sixth, seventh, eighth, thirteenth, and fourteenth, the language of which "differs in no respect from that of prose." But this does not appear to be particularly ingenuous. If we allow the sun to be called Phoebus, and if we pardon the "green attire," there is not a single expression in the sonnet which is fantastic or pompous. It is simplicity itself in comparison with most of Milton's sonnets, and it seems as though Wordsworth might have found an instance of fatuous grandiloquence much fitter to his hand in Young, or better still in Armstrong, master of those who go about to call a hat a "swart sombrero." Gray's graceful sonnet was plainly the result of his late study of Petrarch, and we may remind ourselves, in this age of flourishing sonneteers, that it is almost the only specimen of its class that had been written in English for a hundred years, certainly the only one that is still read with pleasure. One other fact may be noted, that in this little poem Gray first begins to practise the quatrain of alternate heroics, which later on became, as we shall see, the basis of all his harmonic effects, and which he learned to fashion with more skill than any other poet before or since.

In the same month of August was written the Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, or, as in Gray's own MS. which I have examined, of Eton College, Windsor, and the