Gray was laid in the same grave with his mother, "the careful, tender mother of many children, one alone of whom," as he wrote upon her gravestone, "had the misfortune to survive her." Their tomb—a low, oblong, brick structure, covered with a large slab—stands a few feet away from the church wall, upon which is a small tablet to denote its place. The poet's name has not been inscribed above him. There was no need here of "storied urn or animated bust." The place is his monument, and the majestic Elegy—giving to the soul of the place a form of seraphic beauty and a voice of celestial music—is his immortal epitaph.
"There scatter'd oft, the earliest of ye Year,
By hands unseen are showers of vi'lets found;
The Redbreast loves to build & warble there,
And little Footsteps lightly print the ground."
There is a monument to Gray in Stoke Park, about two hundred yards from the church; but it seems commemorative of the builder rather than the poet. They intend to set a memorial window in the church, to honour him, and the visitor finds there a money-box for the reception of contributions in aid of this pious design. Nothing will be done amiss that serves to direct closer attention to his life. It was one of the best lives ever recorded in the history of literature. It was a life singularly pure, noble, and beautiful. In two qualities, sincerity and reticence, it was exemplary almost beyond a parallel; and those are qualities that literary character in the present day has great need to acquire. Gray was averse to publicity. He did not sway by the censure of other men; neither did he need their admiration as his breath of life. Poetry, to him, was a great art, and he added nothing to literature until he had first made it as nearly perfect as it could be made by the thoughtful, laborious exertion of his best powers, superadded to the spontaneous impulse and flow of his genius. More voluminous writers, Charles Dickens among the rest, have sneered at him because he wrote so little. The most colossal form of human complacency is that of the individual who thinks all other creatures inferior who happen to be unlike himself. This reticence on the part of Gray was, in fact, the emblem of his sincerity and the compelling cause of his imperishable renown. There is a better thing than the great man who is always speaking; and that is the great man who only speaks when he has a great word to say. Gray has left only a few poems; but of his principal works each is perfect in its kind, supreme and unapproachable. He did not test merit by reference to ill-formed and capricious public opinion, but he wrought according to the highest standards of art that learning and taste could furnish. His letters form an English classic. There is no purer prose in existence; there is not much that is so pure. But the crowning glory of Gray's nature, the element that makes it so impressive, the charm that brings the pilgrim to Stoke-Pogis church to muse upon it, was the self-poised, sincere, and lovely exaltation of its contemplative spirit. He was a man whose conduct of life would, first of all, purify, expand, and adorn the temple of his own soul, out of which should afterward flow, in their own free way, those choral harmonies that soothe, guide, and exalt the human race. He lived before he wrote. The soul of the Elegy is the soul of the man. It was his thought—which he has somewhere expressed in better words than these—that human beings are only at their best while such feelings endure as are engendered when death has just taken from us the objects of our love. That was the point of view from which he habitually looked upon the world; and no man who has learned the lessons of experience can doubt that he was right.
Gray was twenty-six years old when he wrote the first draft of the Elegy. He began that poem in 1742, at Stoke-Pogis, and he finished and published it in 1751. No visitor to this churchyard can miss either its inspiration or its imagery. The poet has been dead more than a hundred years, but the scene of his rambles and reveries has suffered no material change. One of his yew-trees, indeed, much weakened with age, was some time since blown down, in a storm, and its fragments have been carried away. The picturesque manor house not far distant was once the home of Admiral Penn, father of William Penn the famous Quaker.†
† William Penn and his children are buried in the little Jordans graveyard, not many miles away. The visitor to Stoke-Pogis should not omit a visit to Upton church, Burnham village, and Binfield. Pope lived at Binfield when he wrote his poem on Windsor Forest. Upton claims to have had a share in the inspiration of the Elegy, but Stoke-Pogis was unquestionably his place of residence when he wrote it. Langley Marish ought to be visited also, and Horton—where Milton wrote "L'Allegro," "II Penseroso," and "Comus." Chalfont St. Peter is accessible, where still is standing the house in which Milton finished Paradise Lost and began Paradise Regained; and from there a short drive will take you to Beaconsfield, where you may see Edmund Burke's tablet, in the church, and the monument to Waller, in the churchyard.
All the trees of the region have, of course, waxed and expanded,—not forgetting the neighbouring beeches of Burnham, among which he loved to wander, and where he might often have been found, sitting with his book, at some gnarled wreath of "old fantastic roots." But in its general characteristics, its rustic homeliness and peaceful beauty, this "glimmering landscape," immortalised in his verse, is the same on which his living eyes have looked. There was no need to seek for him in any special spot. The house in which he once lived might, no doubt, be discovered; but every nook and vista, every green lane and upland lawn and ivy-mantled tower of this delicious solitude is haunted with his presence.
The night is coming on and the picture will soon be dark; but never while memory lasts can it fade out of the heart. What a blessing would be ours, if only we could hold forever that exaltation of the spirit, that sweet, resigned serenity, that pure freedom from all the passions of nature and all the cares of life, which comes upon us in such a place as this! Alas, and again alas! Even with the thought this golden mood begins to melt away; even with the thought comes our dismissal from its influence. Nor will it avail us anything now to linger at the shrine. Fortunate is he, though in bereavement and regret, who parts from beauty while yet her kiss is warm upon his lips,—waiting not for the last farewell word, hearing not the last notes of the music, seeing not the last gleams of sunset as the light dies from the sky. It was a sad parting, but the memory of the place can never now be despoiled of its loveliness. As I write these words I stand again in the cool and dusky silence of the poet's church, with its air of stately age and its fragrance of cleanliness, while the light of the western sun, broken into rays of gold and ruby, streams through the painted windows and softly falls upon the quaint little galleries and decorous pews; and, looking forth through the low, arched door, I see the dark and melancholy boughs of the dreaming yew-tree, and, nearer, a shadow of rippling leaves in the clear sunshine of the churchway path. And all the time a gentle voice is whispering, in the chambers of thought—
"No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode:
(There they alike in trembling hope repose),
The bosom of his Father and his God."