nd howls during the
playing of the organ. The Castle of Indolence was for Collins no keep of
the pleasures. One may doubt if it is ever this for any artist. Did not
even Horace attempt to escape into Stoicism? Did not Stevenson write
_Pulvis et Umbra_?

Assuredly Gray, though he was as fastidious in his appetites as Collins
was wild, cannot be called in as a witness to prove the Castle of
Indolence a happy place. "Low spirits," he wrote, when he was still an
undergraduate, "are my true and faithful companions; they get up with me,
go to bed with me, make journeys and return as I do; nay, and pay visits,
and will even affect to be jocose, and force a feeble laugh with me." The
end of the sentence shows (as do his letters, indeed, and his verses on
the drowning of Horace Walpole's cat) that his indolent melancholy was not
without its compensations. He was a wit, an observer of himself and the
world about him, a man who wrote letters that have the genius of the
essay. Further, he was Horace Walpole's friend, and (while his father had
a devil in him) his mother and his aunts made a circle of quiet tenderness
into which he could always retire. "I do not remember," Mr. Gosse has said
of Gray, "that the history of literature presents us with the memoirs of
any other poet favoured by nature with so many aunts as Gray possessed."
This delicious sentence contains an important criticism of Gray. Gray was
a poet of the sheltered life. His genius was shy and retiring. He had no
ambition to thrust himself upon the world. He kept himself to himself, as
the saying is. He published the _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_ in 1751
only because the editors of the _Magazine of Magazines_ had got hold of a
copy and Gray was afraid that they would publish it first. How lethargic a
poet Gray was may be gathered from the fact that he began the _Elegy_ as
far back as 1746--Mason says it was begun in August, 1742--and did not
finish it until June 12, 1750. Probably there is no other short poem in
English literature which was brooded over for so many seasons. Nor was
there ever a greater justification for patient brooding. Gray in this poem
liberated the English imagination after half a century of prose and
rhetoric. He restored poetry to its true function as the confession of an
individual soul. Wordsworth has blamed Gray for introducing, or at least,
assisting to introduce, the curse of poetic diction into English
literature. But poetic diction was i