Part 6 (1/2)
”Thoughtless of Beauty, she was beauty's self Recluse among the close embowering woods.
As in the hollow breast of Apennine, Beneath the shelter of encircling hills, A myrtle rises far from human eyes, And breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild; So flourished, blooming, and unseen by all, The sweet Lavinia; till at length compelled By strong necessity's supreme command, With smiling patience in her looks, she went To glean Palemon's fields.”
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There are more words, but the words gleam! Pope is the master, yet mastered by rules; Thomson less a master, but free from bonds.
He tried play-writing, in those days when Fielding was just beginning in the same line, but it was not a success. After a year or two of travel upon the Continent, on some tutoring business, he published an ambitious poem (1734-1736) ent.i.tled _Liberty_--never a favorite. He had made friends, however, about the Court; and he pleasantly contrived to possess himself of some of those pensioned places, which fed unduly his natural indolence. But all will forgive him this vice, who have read his fine poem of the _Castle of Indolence_ in Spenserian verse.
It was his last work--perhaps his best, and first published in 1748, the year of his death.
One stanza from it I must quote; and shall never forget my first hearing of it, in tremulous utterance, from the lips of the venerable John Quincy Adams, after he had bid adieu (as he thought) to public life and was addressing[13] a {78} large a.s.semblage in the university town of New Haven:
”I care not, Fortune, what you me deny!
You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace, You cannot shut the windows of the sky Through which Aurora shows her brightening face; You cannot bar my constant feet to trace The woods and lawns by living streams at eve; Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace And I their toys to the great children leave, Of fancy, reason, virtue, nought can me bereave.”
Most readers will think kindly and well of this poet; and if you love the country, you will think yet more kindly of him; and on summer afternoons, when cool breezes blow in at your windows and set all the leaves astir over your head, his muse--if you have made her acquaintance--will coo to you from among the branches: but you will never and nowhere find in him the precision, the vigor, the point, the polish, we found in Pope; and which you may find, too, in the fine parcel-work {79} done by Thomas Gray, who was a contemporary of Thomson's, but younger by some fifteen years.
_Thomas Gray._
You will know of that first poem of his--_Ode to Eton College_; at least you know its terminal lines, which are cited on all the high-roads:--
”Where ignorance is bliss 'Tis folly to be wise!”
All the world knows, too, his _Elegy_, on which his fame princ.i.p.ally rests. Its melancholy music gets somehow stamped on the brain of nearly all of us, and lends a poetic halo to every old graveyard that has the shadow of a church tower slanted over it.
Gray[14] was, like Milton, a London boy--born on Cornhill under the shadow almost of St. Paul's. The father was a cross-grained man, living apart from Mrs. Gray, who, it is said, by the gains of some haberdashery traffic which she set up in {80} Cornhill, sent her boy to Eton and to Cambridge. At Eton he came to know Horace Walpole, travelled with him over Europe, after leaving Cambridge, until they quarrelled and each took his own path. That quarrel, however, was mended somewhat later and Walpole became as good a friend to Gray as he could be to anybody--except Mr. Walpole.
The poet, after his father's death, undertook, in a languid way, the study of law; but finally landed again in Cambridge, and was a dilettanteish student there nearly all his days, being made a Professor of History at last; but not getting fairly into harness before the gout laid hold of him and killed him. Probably no man in English literature has so large a reputation for so little work. Gibbon regretted that he should not have completed his philosophic poem on education and government; Dr. Johnson, who spoke halting praise of his poems, thought he would have made admirable books of travel; Cowper says, ”I once thought Swift's letters the best that could be written, but I like Gray's better.”
The truth is, he was a fastidious, scholarly man, whose over-nicety of taste was always in {81} the way of large accomplishment. He was content to do nothing, except he did something in the best possible way. He so cherished refinements that refinements choked his impulses.
A great stickler he was, too, for social refinements--distinctions, preferments, and clap-trap--wanting his courtesies, of which he was as chary as of his poems, to have the last stamp of gentility; thus running into affectations of decorum, which, one time, made him the b.u.t.t of practical jokers at his college. Some lovers of fun there sounded an alarm of fire for the sake of seeing the elegant Mr. Gray (not then grown famous, to be sure) slipping down a rope-ladder in undress, out of his window; which he did do, but presently changed his college in dudgeon. He had, moreover, a great deal of Walpole's affected contempt for authors.h.i.+p--wanted rather to be counted an elegant gentleman who only played with letters. He writes to his friend that the proprietors of a magazine were about to print his Elegy, and says:--
”I have but one bad way to escape the honor they would inflict upon me, and therefore desire you would make {82} Dodsley print it immediately, without my name, but on his best paper and type. _If he would add a line to say it came into his hands by accident, I should like it better_.”
I think he caught this starched folly (if it were folly) from Walpole.
I have heard of over-elegant people in our day with the same affectation; but, as a rule, they do not write poems so good as the _Elegy_.
Gray died, after that quiet life of his, far down in the days of George III., 1771, leaving little work done, but a very great name. He was buried, as was fitting, beside his mother, in that churchyard at Stoke, out of which the Elegy grew. And if you ever have a half day to spare in London, it is worth your while to go out to Slough (twenty miles by the Great Western road), and thence, two miles of delicious walk among shady lanes and wanton hedges, to where Stoke-Pogis Church, curiously hung over with ivy, rises amongst the graves; and if sentimentally disposed, you may linger there, till the evening shadows fall, and repeat to yourself (or anybody you like)--
”The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea.
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”
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_A Courtier._