ecstatic, and ought to be visited in
pilgrimage once a year. None but those monstrous creatures of God know
how to join so much beauty with so much horror. A fig for your poets,
painters, gardeners, and clergymen that have not been among them."

Again in 1770, the year before his death, he spent six weeks on a ramble
through the western counties, descending the Wye in a boat for forty
miles, and visiting among other spots which the muse had then, or has
since, made illustrious, Hagley and the Leasowes, the Malvern Hills and
Tintern Abby. But the most significant of Gray's "Lilliputian travels,"
was his tour of the Lake Country in 1769. Here he was on ground that has
since become classic; and the lover of Wordsworth encounters with a
singular interest, in Gray's "Journal in the Lakes," written nearly
thirty years before the "Lyrical Ballads," names like Grasmere, Winander,
Skiddaw, Helvellyn, Derwentwater, Borrowdale, and Lodore. What
distinguishes the entries in this journal from contemporary writing of
the descriptive kind is a certain intimacy of comprehension, a depth of
tone which makes them seem like nineteenth-century work. To Gray the
landscape was no longer a picture. It had sentiment, character, meaning,
almost personality. Different weathers and different hours of the day
lent it expressions subtler than the poets had hitherto recognized in the
broad, general changes of storm and calm, light and darkness, and the
successions of the seasons. He heard Nature when she whispered, as well
as when she spoke out loud. Thomson could not have written thus, nor
Shenstone, nor even, perhaps, Collins. But almost any man of cultivation
and sensibility can write so now; or, if not so well, yet with the same
accent. A passage or two will make my meaning clearer.

"To this second turning I pursued my way about four miles along its
borders [Ulswater], beyond a village scattered among trees and called
Water Mallock, in a pleasant, grave day, perfectly calm and warm, but
without a gleam of sunshine. Then, the sky seeming to thicken, the
valley to grown more desolate, and evening drawing on, I returned by the
way I came to Penrith. . . While I was here, a little shower fell, red
clouds came marching up the hills from the east, and part of a bright
rainbow seemed to rise along the side of Castle Hill. . . The calmness
and brightness of the evening, the roar of the waters, and the thumping
of huge hammers at an iron