ages which
find a mirrour in every mind and with sentiments to which every bosom
returns an echo." Universality, clarity, incisive lapidary
diction--these qualities may be somewhat staled in praise of the
"classical" style, yet it is precisely in these traits that the
"Elegy" proves most nobly. The artificial figures of rhetorical
arrangement that are so omnipresent in the antitheses, chiasmuses,
parallelisms, etc., of Pope and his school are in Gray's best
quatrains unobtrusive or even infrequent.

Often in the art of the period an affectation of simplicity covers and
reveals by turns a great thirst for ingenuity. Swift's prose is a fair
example; in the "Tale of a Tub" and even in "Gulliver" at first sight
there seems to appear only an honest and simple directness; but pry
beneath the surface statements, or allow yourself to be dazzled by
their coruscations of meaning, and you immediately see you are
watching a stylistic prestidigitator. The later, more orderly dignity
of Dr. Johnson's exquisitely chosen diction is likewise ingeniously
studied and self-conscious. When Gray soared into the somewhat turgid
pindaric tradition of his day, he too was slaking a thirst for
rhetorical complexities. But in the "Elegy" we have none of that. Nor
do we have artifices like the "chaste Eve" or the "meek-eyed maiden"
apostrophized in Collins and Joseph Warton. For Gray the hour when the
sky turns from opal to dusk leaves one not "breathless with
adoration," but moved calmly to placid reflection tuned to drowsy
tinklings or to a moping owl. It endures no contortions of image or of
verse. It registers the sensations of the hour and the reflections
appropriate to it--simply.

It is not difficult to be clear--so we are told by some who habitually
fail of that quality--if you have nothing subtle to say. And it has
been urged on high authority in our day that there is nothing really
"fine" in Gray's "Churchyard." However conscious Gray was in limiting
his address to "the common reader," we may be certain he was not
writing to the obtuse, the illiterate or the insensitive. He was to
create an evocation of evening: the evening of a day and the
approaching night of life. The poem was not to be perplexed by doubt;
it ends on a note of "trembling hope"--but on "hope." There are
perhaps better evocations of similar moods, but not of this precise
mood. Shakespeare's poignant Sonnet LXXIII ("That time of year"),
which suggests no hope, may be o