pear and arrow-heads (our ancestors loved to
protect their privacy with these terrible barriers), I listened to the
waterfall three hundred yards higher up, with its ceaseless music; the
afternoon sun was sparkling on the dimpling water, which runs swiftly
here over a shallow reach of gravel--the favourite spawning-ground of
the trout. There is no peep of river scenery I like so much as this.
Thirty yards up stream a shapely ash tree hangs its branches, clothed
with narrow sprays, right across the brook, the fantastic foliage
almost touching the water. A little higher up some willows and an elm
overhang from the other side.

There is something unspeakably striking about a country lane or a
shallow, rippling brook overarched with a tracery of fretted foliage
like the roof of an old Gothic building.

Who that has ever visited the village of Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire
will forget the lane by which he approached the home and last
resting-place of the poet Gray? Perhaps you came from Eton, and after
passing along a lane that is completely overhung with an avenue of
splendid trees, where the thrushes sing among the branches as they sing
nowhere else in that neighbourhood, you turned in at a little rustic
gate. Straight in front of your eyes were very legibly written on grey
stone three of the finest verses of the "Elegy." The monument itself is
plain, not to say hideous, but the simple words inscribed thereon are
unspeakably grand when read amongst the surroundings of "wood" and
"rugged elm" and "yew-tree's shade," unchanged as they are after the
lapse of a century and a half. The place, and more especially the lane,
is a fitting abode for the spirit of the poet. One could almost hear the
song of him who, "being dead, yet speaketh":

"And the birds in the sunshine above
Mingled their notes therewith, like voices of spirits departed."

LONGFELLOW.

Gray is a poet for whom, in common with most Englishmen, the present
writer has a sincere respect. It has been said, however, of the "Elegy"
by one critic that the subject of the poem gives it an unmerited
popularity, and by another--and that quite recently--that it is the
"high-water mark of mediocrity." Although Gray's own modest dictum was
the foundation of the first of these harsh criticisms, we are unable to
allow the truth of the one and must strongly protest against the other.
It has been reported that Wolfe, the celebrated general, after