“On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
Some pious drops the closing eye requires,
E’en from the tomb the voice of nature cries,
E’en in our ashes live their wonted fires.”
It is altogether, it will be seen, a very elaborate structure. Gray was a genuine lover of nature; yet he would rather make a patchwork out of poetical phrases, and the traditional imagery of the poets, than place himself in the scene he meant to describe, and watch in imagination the effects it would produce upon him. The critics have remarked that, in the opening stanzas of the Elegy, events are described as contemporaneous which must have been successive. We have sunset in one stanza:—
“Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight.”
And in the next, we have advanced into the perfect moonlight:—
“Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
The moping owl does to the moon complain,
Of such as, wandering near her secret bow’r,