He tried play-writing, in those days when Fielding was just beginning in the same line, but it was not a success. After a year or two of travel upon the Continent, on some tutoring business, he published an ambitious poem (1734-1736) entitled Liberty—never a favorite. He had made friends, however, about the Court; and he pleasantly contrived to possess himself of some of those pensioned places, which fed unduly his natural indolence. But all will forgive him this vice, who have read his fine poem of the Castle of Indolence in Spenserian verse. It was his last work—perhaps his best, and first published in 1748, the year of his death.
One stanza from it I must quote; and shall never forget my first hearing of it, in tremulous utterance, from the lips of the venerable John Quincy Adams, after he had bid adieu (as he thought) to public life and was addressing[[13]] a large assemblage in the university town of New Haven:
"I care not, Fortune, what you me deny!
You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace,
You cannot shut the windows of the sky
Through which Aurora shows her brightening face;
You cannot bar my constant feet to trace
The woods and lawns by living streams at eve;
Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace
And I their toys to the great children leave,
Of fancy, reason, virtue, nought can me bereave."
Most readers will think kindly and well of this poet; and if you love the country, you will think yet more kindly of him; and on summer afternoons, when cool breezes blow in at your windows and set all the leaves astir over your head, his muse—if you have made her acquaintance—will coo to you from among the branches: but you will never and nowhere find in him the precision, the vigor, the point, the polish, we found in Pope; and which you may find, too, in the fine parcel-work done by Thomas Gray, who was a contemporary of Thomson's, but younger by some fifteen years.
Thomas Gray.
You will know of that first poem of his—Ode to Eton College; at least you know its terminal lines, which are cited on all the high-roads:—
"Where ignorance is bliss
'Tis folly to be wise!"
All the world knows, too, his Elegy, on which his fame principally rests. Its melancholy music gets somehow stamped on the brain of nearly all of us, and lends a poetic halo to every old graveyard that has the shadow of a church tower slanted over it.
Gray[[14]] was, like Milton, a London boy—born on Cornhill under the shadow almost of St. Paul's. The father was a cross-grained man, living apart from Mrs. Gray, who, it is said, by the gains of some haberdashery traffic which she set up in Cornhill, sent her boy to Eton and to Cambridge. At Eton he came to know Horace Walpole, travelled with him over Europe, after leaving Cambridge, until they quarrelled and each took his own path. That quarrel, however, was mended somewhat later and Walpole became as good a friend to Gray as he could be to anybody—except Mr. Walpole.
The poet, after his father's death, undertook, in a languid way, the study of law; but finally landed again in Cambridge, and was a dilettanteish student there nearly all his days, being made a Professor of History at last; but not getting fairly into harness before the gout laid hold of him and killed him. Probably no man in English literature has so large a reputation for so little work. Gibbon regretted that he should not have completed his philosophic poem on education and government; Dr. Johnson, who spoke halting praise of his poems, thought he would have made admirable books of travel; Cowper says, "I once thought Swift's letters the best that could be written, but I like Gray's better."