[368-32] Due means appropriate or proper.
[368-33] As first written, the poem contained the following stanza, placed before the epitaph; but in the final revision Gray rejected it as unworthy. It seems a very critical taste that would reject such lines as these:
“There scatter’d oft, the earliest of the year,
By hands unseen are show’rs of violets found:
The redbreast loves to build and warble there,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground.”
THE SHIPWRECK[371-1]
By Robert Louis Stevenson
I went down, and drank my fill; and then came up, and got a blink at the moon; and then down again. They say a man sinks the third time for good. I cannot be made like other folk, then, for I would not like to write how often I went down or how often I came up again. All the while, I was being hurled along, and beaten upon and choked, and then swallowed whole; and the thing was so distracting to my wits, that I was neither sorry nor afraid.
Presently, I found I was holding to a spar, which helped me somewhat. And then all of a sudden I was in quiet water, and began to come to myself.
It was the spare yard I had got hold of, and I was amazed to see how far I had traveled from the brig. I hailed her, indeed; but it was plain she was already out of cry. She was still holding together; but whether or not they had yet launched the boat, I was too far off and too low down to see.