As a writer he had this peculiarity, that he did not write his pieces first rudely, and then correct them, but laboured every line as it arose in the train of composition; and he had a notion, not very peculiar, that he could not write but at certain times, or at happy moments; a fantastick foppery, to which my kindness for a man of learning and virtue wishes him to have been superiour.
Gray’s poetry is now to be considered; and I hope not to be looked on as an enemy to his name, if I confess that I contemplate it with less pleasure than his life. His ode on Spring has something poetical, both in the language and the thought; but the language is too luxuriant, and the thoughts have nothing new. There has, of late, arisen a practice of giving to adjectives derived from substantives, the termination of participles; such as the cultured plain, the daisied bank; but I was sorry to see, in the lines of a scholar like Gray, the honied spring. The morality is natural, but too stale; the conclusion is pretty.
The poem on the Cat was, doubtless, by its author, considered as a trifle; but it is not a happy trifle. In the first stanza, “the azure flowers that blow” show resolutely a rhyme is sometimes made when it cannot easily be found. Selima, the cat, is called a nymph, with some violence both to language and sense; but there is no good use made of it when it is done: for of the two lines,
What female heart can gold despise?
What cat’s averse to fish?
The first relates merely to the nymph, and the second only to the cat. The sixth stanza contains a melancholy truth, that “a favourite has no friend;” but the last ends in a pointed sentence of no relation to the purpose; if what glistered had been gold, the cat would not have gone into the water; and, if she had, would not less have been drowned.
The Prospect of Eton College suggests nothing to Gray which every beholder does not equally think and feel. His supplication to father Thames, to tell him who drives the hoop or tosses the ball, is useless and puerile. Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself[198] His epithet, “buxom health,” is not elegant; he seems not to understand the word. Gray thought his language more poetical as it was more remote from common use; finding in Dryden “honey redolent of spring,” an expression that reaches the utmost limits of our language, Gray drove it a little more beyond common apprehension, by making “gales” to be “redolent of joy and youth.”
Of the Ode on Adversity, the hint was, at first, taken from “O Diva, gratum quæ regis Antium;” but Gray has excelled his original by the variety of his sentiments, and by their moral application. Of this piece, at once poetical and rational, I will not, by slight objections, violate the dignity.
My process has now brought me to the wonderful wonder of wonders, the two sister odes; by which, though either vulgar ignorance or common sense at first universally rejected them, many have been since persuaded to think themselves delighted. I am one of those that are willing to be pleased, and, therefore, would gladly find the meaning of the first stanza of the Progress of Poetry.
Gray seems, in his rapture, to confound the images of “spreading sound” and “running water.” A “stream of musick,” may be allowed; but where does “musick,” however “smooth and strong,” after having visited the “verdant vales, roll down the steep amain,” so as that “rocks and nodding groves rebellow to the roar!” If this be said of musick, it is nonsense; if it be said of water, it is nothing to the purpose.