The next year the British Museum was opened (15th January 1759), and Gray went to London to read and transcribe the MSS. collected there from the Harleian and Cottoman libraries. During his residence in the capital, appeared two odes to "Obscurity" and "Oblivion," in ridicule of his lyrics, from the pens of Colman and Lloyd, full of spirited satire, which failed, however, to disturb the poet's equanimity. Like many fastidious writers, he was more afraid of his own taste, and of the strictures of good-natured friends, than of the attacks of foes. In 1762 he applied for the Professorship of Modern History, vacant by the death of Turner; but it was given to Brochet, the tutor of Sir James Lowther.
In 1765 he took a tour to Scotland, and saw many of its more interesting points—Stirling, Loch Tay, the Pass of Killierankie, and Glammis Castle, where he met Beattie. He wrote a very entertaining account of the journey, in his letters to his friends. He was offered an LL.D. by the College of Aberdeen; but out of respect to his own University, declined the honour. In 1767 he added his "Imitations of Welsh and Norwegian Poetry" to his other productions. Sir Walter Scott tells us, that when Gray's poems reached the Orkney and Shetland Isles, and when the "Fatal Sisters" was repeated by a clergyman to some of the old inhabitants, they remembered having sung it all in its native language to him years before. In 1768, the Professorship of Modern History falling again vacant by Mr Brochet's death, the Duke of Grafton instantly bestowed it on Gray, who, out of gratitude, wrote an ode on the installation of his patron to the Chancellorship of Cambridge University. He went from witnessing this ceremony to the Lakes of Cumberland, and kept an interesting journal of his tour to that then little known and most enchanting region. In 1770, he visited Wales; but owing probably to poor health, has left no notes of his journey. In May the next year, his health became worse, his spirits more depressed, an incurable cough preyed on his lungs; he resigned his Professorship, and shortly after removed to London. There he rallied a little, and returned to Cambridge, where, on the 24th of July, he was seized with a severe attack of gout in the stomach. Of this he expired on the 30th, in the 55th year of his age, without any apparent fear of death. He was buried by the side of his mother, in the churchyard of Stoke. A monument was erected by Mason to his memory, in Westminster Abbey.
Gray was a brilliant bookworm. In private he was a quiet, abstracted, dreaming scholar, although in the company of a few friends he could become convivial and witty. His heart, however, was always in his study. His portrait gives you the impression of great fastidiousness, and almost feminine delicacy of face, as well as of considerable self-esteem. His face has more of the critic than of the poet. His learning and accomplishments have been equalled perhaps by no poet since Milton. He knew the Classics, the Northern Scalds, the Italian poets and historians, the French novelists, Architecture, Zoology, Painting, Sculpture, Botany, Music, and Antiquities. But he liked better, he said, to read than to write. You figure him always lounging with a volume in his hand, on a sofa, and crying out, "Be mine to read eternal novels of Marivaux and Crebillon." Against his moral character there exists no imputation; and notwithstanding a sneering hint of Walpole's, his religious creed seems to have been orthodox.
With all his learning and genius, he has done little. His letters and poems remind you of a few scattered leaves, surviving the conflagration of the Alexandrian library. The very popularity of the scraps which such a writer leaves, secures the torments of Tantalus to his numerous admirers in all after ages. His letters, in their grace, freedom, minuteness of detail, occasional playfulness, delicious asides of gossip, and easy vigour of description, are more worthy of his powers, as a whole, than his poetry. The poetic fragments he has left are rarely of such merit as to excite any wish that they had been finished. His genius, although true and exquisite, was limited in its range, and hidebound in its movements. You see his genius, like a child, always casting a look of terror round on its older companion and guardian—his taste. Like Campbell, "he often spreads his wings grandly, but shrinks back timidly to his perch again, and seems afraid of the shadow of his own fame." Within his own range, however, he is as strong as he is delicate and refined. His two principal Odes have, as we hinted, divided much the opinion of critics. Dr Johnson has assailed them in his worst style of captious and word-catching criticism. Now, that there is much smoke around their fire, we grant. But we argue that there is genuine fire amidst their smoke,—first, from the fact that so many of their lines, such as,
"The bloom of young Desire, and purple light of Love;"
"The terror of his beak, and lightnings of his eye;"
"Their feather-cinctured chiefs, and dusky loves;"
"Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air;"
"Beneath the good how far, but far above the great"
"High-born Hoel's harp, and soft Llewellyn's lay,"
are so often and admiringly quoted; and because, secondly, we can trace the influence of the "Progress of Poetry," and of the "Bard," on much of the higher song that has succeeded,—on the poetry of Bowles, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Campbell, and Shelley. Gray was not a sun shining in his strength, but he was the morning star, prognosticating the coming of a warmer and brighter poetic day.
He that can see no merit in the "Ode on the Distant Prospect of Eton College," can surely never have been a boy. The boy's heart beats in its every line, and yet all the experiences of boyhood are seen and shown in the sober light of those
"Years which bring the philosophic mind."
Here lies the complex charm of the poem. The unthinking gaiety of boyhood, its light sports, its airy gladness, its springy motions, the "tears forgot as soon as shed," the "sunshine of the breast" of that delightful period—are contrasted with the still and often sombre reflection, the grave joys, the carking cares, the stern concentred passions, the serious pastimes, the spare but sullen and burning tears, the sad smiles of manhood; and contrasted by one who is realising both with equal vividness and intensity—because he is in age a man, and in memory and imagination an Eton schoolboy still. The breezes of boyhood return and blow on a head on which gray hairs are beginning "here and there" to whiten; and he cries—
"I feel the gales that from ye blow
A momentary bliss bestow,
As, waving fresh their gladsome wing,
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring."