'Twas on a lofty vase's side.
The Eton Ode was composed, with a beautiful sonnet commemorating a private sorrow, in 1742:—
In vain to me the smiling mornings shine.
Earlier in the same year the "Ode to Spring," marked "to be sent to Fav,"—to West, his friend commemorated in the sonnet,—had been written, "not knowing he was then dead". Again, in October, 1742, another death prompted "The Elegy," which lay unfinished for about eight years. Grief had shaken Gray out of causeless melancholy, and 1742 was his great poetic year. In 1750 he wrote the light and bright "Long Story," on an unexpected visit from some poet-hunting ladies. In 1753, Walpole had Gray's "Six Poems" published, in twenty-one pages, with illustrations by Bentley. In 1754 he began the "Pindaric Odes," of which "The Progress of Poesy" is the noblest, and displays most of
the pride and ample pinion
That the Theban eagle bear
Sailing with supreme dominion
Thro' the azure deep of air.
To compose "The Bard" (the Welsh Bard) took two years and a half, and neither the style nor the ideas of the Odes were thought pleasing, or comprehensible, by the public and Dr. Johnson. In his demure way the little poet was a rebel, and Dr. Johnson knew it. Gray never practised the adulation of "the great" that was customary; he asked for no places, he refused the Laureateship. Late in life a sinecure Professorship at Cambridge was given to him. The professor never lectured: not to lecture was the convention, and against this happy convention Gray did not rebel. He studied, made notes, learned Norse, translated, visited haunted Glamis, with the chamber where Malcolm II was murdered, visited the Lakes, wrote the most delightful letters, and died at 54 in 1771, the year of the birth of Sir Walter Scott, the year of Burns's twelfth birthday.
Gray had genius—not a great, but a new genius, and had many accomplishments. His satires were surprisingly sharp and fierce. He had the light French touch of the day in verses of society. There is something of the noble pensiveness and mysteriously appealing music of Virgil in his best poems: if he be "a second-rate poet" (an unkind way of saying that he is not a Shakespeare or Homer), he shares with first-rate poets the power of moving all readers; he is not the poet of a set of refined amateurs. He who moved and soothed the heart of James Wolfe in the crisis of his fortunes, and who has charmed every generation of the English race since Wolfe and Montcalm gloriously fell, has done more than enough for fame.
The Wartons.
Gray's taste for ancient Scandinavian poetry, itself a symptom of the tendency to study all poetry, however old, exotic, and unconscious of the rules of the eighteenth century, was not a new thing. We are apt to think of Swift's patron, Sir William Temple, as an example of mere gentlemanly and conventional ideas, though happy in the gift of a pure and sometimes exquisite style in prose. But Temple in his essay "Of Heroic Virtue" shows that he was capable of taking sincere pleasure in old Norse poetry, though he knew it only through the Latin translations "by Olaus Wormius in his 'Literatura Runica' (who has very much deserved from the commonwealth of learning, and is very well worth reading by any that love poetry); and to consider the several stamps of that coin, according to several ages and climates". Temple speaks of "The Death Song" of Ragnar Lodbrog as a "sonnet" and applauds "An Ode of Scallogrim" (Skalagrim); but his remarks, "I am deceived if in this sonnet and ode there be not a vein truly poetical, and in its kind Pindaric, taking it with the allowance of the different climates, fashions, opinions, and languages of such different countries," though well meant, show a curious idea of the nature of the sonnet.