ldhood play'd,
A stranger yet to pain!
I feel the gales that from ye blow
A momentary bliss bestow,
As waving fresh their gladsome wing,
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And, redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring.'

Every one will perceive the art which enforces the truth of the
general reflections that follow by the personal experience of the
speaker. Again, the 'Progress of Poesy' closes with a personal
allusion which, as it is a climax, might, if ill-managed, have
appeared arrogant, but which is, in fact, a masterpiece of oratory.
After confessing his own inferiority to Pindar, the poet proceeds:

'Yet oft before his infant eyes would run
Such forms as glitter in the Muse's ray,
With orient hues, unborrow'd of the sun;
Yet shall he mount, and keep his distant way,
Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate,
Beneath the Good how far--but far above the Great!'

There is something very noble in the elevated manner in which the
self-complacent triumph of genius, expressed by so many poets from
Ennius downwards, is at once justified and chastened by the
reflection in these lines. We see in them that the poet alludes to
himself in the third person, and he repeats this style in the
'Elegy,' where, after the fourth line, the first personal pronoun is
never again used. How just and beautiful is the turn where, after
contemplating the general lot of the lowly society he is celebrating,
he proceeds to identify his own fate with theirs:

'For _thee_, who, mindful of th' unhonour'd dead,
Dost in these lines their artless tale relate,
If, chance, by lonely contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,

'Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,' etc.

"The two great characteristics of Gray's poetry that we have
noticed--his self-suppression and his sense of form and dignity--are
best described by the word 'classical.' What we particularly admire
in the great authors of Greece and Rome is their public spirit. Their
writings are full of patriotism, good-breeding, and common-sense, and
have that happy mixture of art and nature which is only acquired by
men who have learned from liberty how to discipline individual
instincts by social refinement. Their style is masculine, clear, and
moderate; they seem, as it were, never to lose the sense of being
before an audience, and, like orators who know that they are always
exposed to the judgm