y language, his eye glistening and his accents
glowing, when viewing the charms of all-majestic Nature--the heights of
Skiddaw and the purple crags of Borrowdale. And on a rustic alcove, in
the garden at Aston, which he dedicated to Mr. Gray, he inscribed this
stanza from the celebrated elegy:

_Here scatter'd oft, the loveliest of the year,
By hands unseen, are showers of violets found;
The red-breast loves to build and warble here,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground._

Mr. Mason married in 1765 a most amiable woman; she fell at length into
a rapid consumption, and at Bristol hot-wells she died. Gray's letter to
Mr. Mason while at that place, is full of eloquence; upon which the
latter observes, "I opened it almost at the precise moment when it would
be necessarily most affecting. His epitaph on the monument he erected on
this lady, in the Bristol cathedral, breathes such tender feeling and
chaste simplicity, that it can need no apology for being noticed here:

Take, holy earth! all that my soul holds dear;
Take that best gift which heav'n so lately gave:
To Bristol's fount I bore with trembling care
Her faded form: she bow'd to taste the wave
And died. Does youth, does beauty, read the line?
Does sympathetic fears their breasts alarm?
Speak, dead Maria! breathe a strain divine:
E'en from the grave thou shalt have power to charm.
Bid them be chaste, be innocent, like thee;
Bid them in duty's sphere as meekly move;
And if so fair, from vanity as free;
As firm in friendship, and as fond in love.
Tell them, though 'tis an awful thing to die,
('Twas e'en to thee) yet the dread path once trod,
Heav'n lifts its everlasting portals high,
And bids "the pure in heart behold their God."

A very short time after Mrs. Mason's death, he began his English
Garden, and invokes the genius both of poetry and painting

----that at my birth
Auspicious smil'd, and o'er my cradle dropp'd
Those magic seeds of Fancy, which produce
A Poet's feeling, and a Painter's eye.
----with lenient smiles to deign to cheer,
At this sad hour, my desolated soul.
For deem not ye that I resume the lyre
To court the world's applause; my years mature
Have learn'd to slight the toy. No, 'tis to soothe
That agony of heart, which they alone,
Who best have lov'd, who best have been belov'd,
Can feel, or pi