“The Luggie,” the principal poem of Gray, is a kind of reverie in which the scenes and events of his childhood and his early aspirations are mingled with the music of the stream which he celebrates. The series of sonnets, “In the Shadows,” was composed during the latter part of his illness. Most of his poems necessarily bear traces of immaturity, and lines may frequently be found in them which are mere echoes from Thomson, Wordsworth or Tennyson, but they possess, nevertheless, distinct individuality, and show a real appreciation of natural beauty.
The Luggie and other Poems, with an introduction by R. Monckton Milnes, and a brief memoir by James Hedderwick, was published in 1862; and a new and enlarged edition of Gray’s Poetical Works, edited by Henry Glassford Bell, appeared in 1874. See also David Gray and other Essays, by Robert Buchanan (1868), and the same writer’s poem on David Gray, in Idyls and Legends of Inverburn.
GRAY, ELISHA (1835-1901), American electrician, was born in Barnesville, Belmont county, Ohio, on the 2nd of August 1835. He worked as a carpenter and in a machine shop, reading in physical science at the same time, and for five years studied at Oberlin College, where he taught for a time. He then investigated the subject of telegraphy, and in 1867 patented a telegraphic switch and annunciator. Experimenting in the transmittal of electro-tones and of musical tones by wire, he utilized in 1874 animal tissues in his receivers, and filed, on the 14th of February 1876, a caveat for the invention of a telephone, only a few hours after the filing of an application for a patent by Alexander Graham Bell. (See [Telephone].) The caveat was disregarded; letters patent No. 174,465 were granted to Bell, whose priority of invention was upheld in 1888 by the United States Supreme Court (see Molecular Telephone Co. v. American Bell Telephone Co., 126 U.S. 1). Gray’s experiments won for him high praise and the decoration of the Legion of Honour at the Paris Exposition of 1878. He was for a time a manufacturer of electrical apparatus, particularly of his own inventions; and was chief electrical expert of the Western Electric Company of Chicago. At the Columbian Exposition of 1893 Gray was chairman of the International Congress of Electricians. He died at Newtonville, Massachusetts, on the 21st of January 1901. Among his later inventions were appliances for multiplex telegraphy and the telautograph, a machine for the electric transmission of handwriting. He experimented in the submarine use of electric bells for signalling.
Gray wrote, besides scientific addresses and many monographs, Telegraphy and Telephony (1878) and Electricity and Magnetism (1900).
GRAY, HENRY PETERS (1819-1877). American portrait and genre painter, was born in New York on the 23rd of June 1819. He was a pupil of Daniel Huntington there, and subsequently studied in Rome and Florence. Elected a member of the National Academy of Design in 1842, he succeeded Huntington as president in 1870, holding the position until 1871. The later years of his life were devoted to portrait work. He was strongly influenced by the old Italian masters, painting in mellow colour with a classical tendency. One of his notable canvases was an allegorical composition called “The Birth of our Flag” (1875). He died in New York City on the 12th of November 1877.
GRAY, HORACE (1828-1902), American jurist, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 24th of March 1828. He graduated at Harvard in 1845; was admitted to the bar in 1851, and in 1854-1861 was reporter to the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. He practised law, first in partnership with Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, and later with Wilder Dwight (1823-1862) and Charles F. Blake; was appointed associate justice of the state Supreme Court on the 23rd of August 1864, becoming chief-justice on the 5th of September 1873; and was associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from December 1881 to August 1902, resigning only a few weeks before his death at Nahant, Mass., on the 15th of September 1902. Gray had a fine sense of the dignity of the bench, and a taste for historical study. His judgments were unmistakably clear and contained the essence of earlier opinions. A great case lawyer, he was a much greater judge, the variety of his knowledge and his contributions to admiralty and prize law and to testamentary law being particularly striking; in constitutional law he was a “loose” rather than a “strict” constructionist.
See Francis C. Lowell, “Horace Gray,” in Proceedings of the American Academy, vol. 39, pp. 627-637 (Boston, 1904).