at whose foot the recluse stretched his listless length at noontide, still leaned over the brook. We stayed our lingering steps to listen to its babbling, and point out the wood and the “’customed hill.”
We rode back to the station by way of the hamlet, into whose uncouth name genius has breathed music, and saw Gray’s home. It is a plain, substantial dwelling, little better than a farm-house. In the garden is a summer-house, in which, it is said, he was fond of sitting while he wrote and read. Constitutionally shy, and of exceeding delicacy of nerve and taste, his thoughtfulness deepened by habitual ill-health,—one comprehends, in seeing Stoke-Pogis, why he should have preferred it to any other abode, yet how, in this seclusion, gravity and dreaming should have become a gentle melancholy tingeing every line we have from his pen. As, when apostrophizing Eton:—
“Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shades!
Ah, fields, beloved in vain!
Where once my careless childhood strayed,
A stranger yet to pain.”
This continual guest, Pain, engendered an indolent habit of body. His ideal Heaven was “where one might lie on the sofa all day and read a novel,” unstung by conscience or the contempt of his kind.
“William Penn was born at Stoke-Pogis!” I remembered, aloud and abruptly.
Caput’s eyes were upon the fast-vanishing spire:
“The Elegy—in which I defy any master of English to find a misapplied word—was written twenty times before it was printed,” he observed sententiously.