hamlets brown and dim discovered spires
And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all
Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil,
has escaped from the manner of the eighteenth century, and preludes to Keats.
There are fine free passages in "The Ode to the Passions," and the "Dirge in Cymbeline" is not unworthy of its place. The "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands," was long lost, and did not receive the poet's final touches. He obtained his knowledge of the Second Sight from John Home, author of "Douglas," who was a Hanoverian volunteer in the Forty-five, and inspired in Collins an unfulfilled desire to visit Tay and Teviotdale and Yarrow. The conventions of his age sometimes disfigure Collins's poems, but his face was set towards the City of Romance. Tastes still vary as to the relative merit of Collins and Gray: Matthew Arnold being the advocate of Gray; Swinburne of Collins. There is no way of settling such disputes; each writer, at his best, was truly a poet; neither, at his best, is staled or dimmed by time; both were almost portentous exceptions, when really inspired, to the conventional rules of their age in England.
Thomas Gray.
Nature occasionally brings into the world pairs of men destined to be distinguished in literature, and, without their own consent, to be pitted against each other as rivals. We have Scott and Byron, Dickens and Thackeray, Tennyson and Browning, and Collins and Gray. Gray was the elder, born in 1716 (Collins was born in 1721). If Collins's father was a hatter, Gray's mother was a bonnet-maker, if milliners make bonnets. Collins went to Oxford, after being at Winchester; Gray, before going to Peterhouse, Cambridge, was at Eton. Both poets wrote little: the health of Collins broke down; Gray, from his boyhood, was of a gentle morbid melancholy, and had humour enough to laugh at himself. Collins was neglected; Gray died, later, at the age of 54, beyond competition or dispute the foremost of English poets at the moment. Both men had their faces set to the North as the home of old poetry and poetic beliefs. Collins wrote his Ode on Highland Superstitions; Gray was delighted (at first) by Macpherson's "Ossian," he translated ancient Norse poems, visited Scotland, and appreciated the Highlands, and the lakes that Wordsworth was to make famous. Both men were scholars: Collins meant to translate Aristotle's "Poetics"; Gray meant to write a history of English Poetry. Both broke away from the tyranny of the rhymed heroic couplet; both especially cultivated the Ode.
There is no doubt as to which of the two is and always has been the more popular. Eton has made Gray her own. The great General Wolfe, before falling in the arms of Victory at Quebec, recited the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" to one of his officers, saying, "I would prefer being the author of that poem to the glory of beating the French to-morrow".
It is not easy to criticize Gray, because so many of his lines are household words, and have been familiar to us from childhood. It may perhaps be said that Gray never attains to the magical effect of Collins's "How Sleep the Brave," and of the "Ode to Evening". But there are cadences in "The Elegy," and sentiments noble, pure, pious, and modest in his poems which lend to them an unspeakable charm, while the ideas are such as come home to men's bosoms. It is true that his habit of personifying abstract ideas is an unfortunate survival of the weary allegorical company of the "Romance of the Rose," and no more than Collins does he escape from the mannerisms of his age. But like Collins, and indeed like his friend Horace Walpole, he was passing towards the kingdom of Romance.
At Eton he acquired Walpole's friendship; and if, after leaving Cambridge, he and Walpole quarrelled in Italy, Walpole confessed that he was to blame, made the first steps to reconciliation, and cherished, admired, and at last regretted Gray with all the ardour of a heart devoted and constant in friendship.
For the rest, Gray's life was passed quietly, and in a melancholy way, at Cambridge, which he reckoned a bear garden, and a home of Indolence; and, with his mother and aunt at Stoke Pogis, where he wrote the Elegy. His poems distilled very slowly from his genius: the Eton Ode appeared, and was unnoticed, in 1747. In the same year were written, to Horace Walpole, the rather hard-hearted lines on Walpole's handsome cat,