popularity. The most of us are obscure. The _Elegy_ flatters us by
suggesting that we might have swayed the rod of empire or "waked to
ecstasy the living lyre," if we had had the chance,--or, what we think
is more likely the explanation, if we had not had a saner insight into
the values of life than the Miltons and Cromwells.

Stoke Pogis is always associated with the name of Gray. It is a
village, if such it may be called, between London and Windsor Castle.
The church is "on a little level space about four miles north of the
Thames at Eton. From the neighborhood of the church no vestige of
hamlet or village is visible, and the aspect of the place is slightly
artificial, like a rustic church in a park on a stage. The traveler
almost expects to see the grateful peasantry of an opera, cheerfully
habited, make their appearance, dancing on the greensward."

Gray and his mother, the father having died in 1741, went to Stoke
Pogis in 1742. At West End House, a simple farmhouse of two stories,
Gray lived for many years. In the autumn of 1742 was begun the _Elegy
in a Country Church-yard_. The common impression is that the whole
poem was written at Stoke Pogis, but this is not the truth. It is
better to say that it was begun in October or November at Stoke Pogis,
continued seven years later at the same place and at Cambridge, and
finished at Stoke Pogis on June 12th, 1750. It is interesting to note
that in each case an impetus was given to the composition of the poem
by the death of a friend. Several months before the poem was begun in
1742, West, a friend whose death made a very deep impression upon the
sensitive nature of Gray, had passed away; and on October 31 Jonathan
Rogers, an uncle of Gray's, died at Stoke Pogis; and when the poem was
next taken up Gray was mourning the death of his aunt. In commenting
on this subject Mr. Gosse writes,--"He was a man who had a very
slender hold on life himself, who walked habitually in the Valley of
the Shadow of Death, and whose periods of greatest vitality were
those in which bereavement proved to him that, melancholy as he was,
even he had something to lose and to regret."

On the 12th of June, 1750, Gray wrote to his friend, Horace
Walpole,--"Having put an end to a thing whose beginning you have seen
long ago, I immediately send it to you. You will, I hope, look upon it
in the light of a thing with an end to it: a merit that most of my
writings have wanted, and are like to want."