s' tour
of the Continent.

No better index of the essential difference between the classical and the
new romantic school can be imagined than that which is revealed in the
letters of Gray and Addison, as they record their impressions of foreign
travel. Thus, when Addison crossed the Alps, some twenty-five years before,
in good weather, he wrote: "A very troublesome journey.... You cannot
imagine how I am pleased with the sight of a plain." Gray crossed the Alps
in the beginning of winter, "wrapped in muffs, hoods and masks of beaver,
fur boots, and bearskins," but wrote ecstatically, "Not a precipice, not a
torrent, not a cliff but is pregnant with religion and poetry."

On his return to England, Gray lived for a short time at Stoke Poges, where
he wrote his "Ode on Eton," and probably sketched his "Elegy," which,
however, was not finished till 1750, eight years later. During the latter
years of his shy and scholarly life he was Professor of Modern History and
Languages at Cambridge, without any troublesome work of lecturing to
students. Here he gave himself up to study and to poetry, varying his work
by "prowlings" among the manuscripts of the new British Museum, and by his
"Lilliputian" travels in England and Scotland. He died in his rooms at
Pembroke College in 1771, and was buried in the little churchyard of Stoke
Poges.

WORKS OF GRAY. Gray's _Letters_, published in 1775, are excellent reading,
and his _Journal_ is still a model of natural description; but it is to a
single small volume of poems that he owes his fame and his place in
literature. These poems divide themselves naturally into three periods, in
which we may trace the progress of Gray's emancipation from the classic
rules which had so long governed English literature. In the first period he
wrote several minor poems, of which the best are his "Hymn to Adversity"
and the odes "To Spring" and "On a Distant Prospect of Eton College." These
early poems reveal two suggestive things: first, the appearance of that
melancholy which characterizes all the poetry of the period; and second,
the study of nature, not for its own beauty or truth, but rather as a
suitable background for the play of human emotions.

The second period shows the same tendencies more strongly developed. The
"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1750), the most perfect poem of
the age, belongs to this period. To read Milton's "Il Penseroso" and Gray's
"Elegy" is to see the beginning a