mory, and said, 'Is not
that GREAT, like his odes?'. . . 'No, sir, there are but two good
stanzas in Gray's poetry, which are in his "Elegy in a Country
Churchyard." He then repeated the stanza--

"'For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,'" etc.

"In all Gray's odes," wrote Johnson, "there is a kind of cumbrous
splendor which we wish away. . . These odes are marked by glittering
accumulations of ungraceful ornaments; they strike rather than please;
the images are magnified by affectation; the language is labored into
harshness. The mind of the writer seems to work with unnatural
violence. . . His art and his struggle are too visible and there is too
little appearance of ease and nature. . . In the character of his
'Elegy,' I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common
sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the
refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally
decided all claims to poetical honors. The 'Churchyard' abounds with
images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which
every bosom returns an echo."

There are noble lines in Gray's more elaborate odes, but they do make as
a whole that mechanical, artificial impression of which Johnson
complains. They have the same rhetorical ring, the worked-up fervor in
place of genuine passion, which was noted in Collins' ode "On the
Passions." Collins and Gray were perpetually writing about the passions;
but they treated them as abstractions and were quite incapable of
exhibiting them in action. Neither of them could have written a ballad,
a play, or a romance. Their odes were bookish, literary, impersonal,
retrospective. They had too much of the ichor of fancy and too little
red blood in them.

But the "Elegy" is the masterpiece of this whole "Il Penseroso" school,
and has summed up for all English readers, for all time, the poetry of
the tomb. Like the "Essay on Man," and "Night Thoughts" and "The Grave,"
it is a poem of the moral-didactic order, but very different in result
from these. Its moral is suffused with emotion and expressed concretely.
Instead of general reflections upon the shortness of life, the vanity of
ambition, the leveling power of death, and similar commonplaces, we have
the picture of the solitary poet, lingering among the graves at twilight
(_hora datur quieti_), till the place and the hour conspire to work their
effect upon the mind and prepare it for