How verse may build a princely
throne on humble truth." Nor can we understand how Cowper is to be set
down as simply a man of letters. We may, too, if we please, deny the
name of poetry to Collins's tender and pensive _Ode to Evening_;
but we can only do this on critical principles, which would end in
classing the author of _Lycidas_ and _Comus_, of the _Allegro_ and
_Penseroso_, as a writer of various accomplishments and great general
ability, but at bottom simply a man of letters and by no means a
poet. It is to Gray, however, that we must turn for the distinctive
character of the best poetry of the eighteenth century. With
reluctance we will surrender the Pindaric Odes, though not without
risking the observation that some of Wordsworth's own criticism on
Gray is as narrow and as much beside the mark as Jeffrey's on the
_Excursion_. But the _Ode on Eton College_ is not to have grudged to
it the noble name and true quality of poetry, merely because, as
one of Johnson's most unfortunate criticisms expresses it, the ode
suggests nothing to Gray which every beholder does not equally think
and feel. To find beautiful and pathetic language, set to harmonious
numbers, for the common impressions of meditative minds, is no small
part of the poet's task. That part has never been achieved by any poet
in any tongue with more complete perfection and success than in the
immortal _Elegy_, of which we may truly say that it has for nearly
a century and a half given to greater multitudes of men more of the
exquisite pleasure of poetry than any other single piece in all the
glorious treasury of English verse. It abounds, as Johnson says, "with
images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which
every bosom returns an echo." These moving commonplaces of the human
lot Gray approached through books and studious contemplation; not, as
Wordsworth approached them, by daily contact with the lives and habit
of men and the forces and magical apparitions of external nature. But
it is a narrow view to suppose that the men of the eighteenth century
did not look through the literary conventions of the day to the truths
of life and nature behind them. The conventions have gone, or are
changed, and we are all glad of it. Wordsworth effected a
wholesome deliverance when he attacked the artificial diction, the
personifications, the allegories, the antitheses, the barren rhymes
and monotonous metres, which the reigning taste had approve