And the bard, after discovering all the miseries of unhappy grandeur, and murmuring at this delay to the house of his friend, exclaims—
| Oh if these ills the price of power advance, Check not my speed where social joys invite! |
The silent departure of the poetical spectre is fine:
| The troubled vision cast a mournful glance, And sighing, vanish’d in the shades of night. |
And to prove that the subject of this elegy thus arose to the poet’s fancy, he has himself commemorated the incident that gave occasion to it, in the opening:—
| On distant heaths, beneath autumnal skies, Pensive I saw the circling shades descend; Weary and faint, I heard the storm arise, While the sun vanish’d like a faithless friend. Elegy vii. |
The Fifteenth Elegy, composed “in memory of a private family in Worcestershire,” is on the extinction of the ancient family of the Penns in the male line.[54] Shenstone’s mother was a Penn; and the poet was now the inhabitant of their ancient mansion, an old timber-built house of the age of Elizabeth. The local description was a real scene—“the shaded pool”—“the group of ancient elms”—“the flocking rooks,” and the picture of the simple manners of his own ancestors, were realities; the emotions they excited were therefore genuine, and not one of those “mockeries” of amplification from the crowd of verse-writers.
The Tenth Elegy, “To Fortune, suggesting his Motive for repining at her Dispensations,” with his celebrated “Pastoral Ballad, in four parts.” were alike produced by what one of the great minstrels of our own times has so finely indicated when he sung—
| The secret woes the world has never known; While on the weary night dawn’d wearier day, And bitterer was the grief devour’d alone. |