I. II. III.

Of this Elegy the three first quatrains be termed the prepapresent what may ration. To the serious exercise that is to take place, it is necessary, that the senses be first properly got under; or, at least, that such work be cut out for them, as may prevent them from embroiling the train of pensive thought. With propriety then has the author made them the objects of his first care. With propriety too, are hearing and sight selected; as the most restive, and unfriendly to meditation, and, of course, requiring management the most. Gray has pushed this matter apoint farther. Not contented with their neutrality, he has proceeded to court their assistance; and held out to them such "guerdons fair," as might win them not only not to obstruct me

ditation, but to act as auxiliaries in promoting it.

When these guerdons are brought forward in exposure; for the ear we have "the sound of the curfew;"" the lowing of the herds, returning to their stalls ;" "the tinkling (I suppose) of wether-bells;" "the droning of the beetle ;" and "the screeching of the owl;" sounds not improper, when taken singly, but destructive, when taken in the total, to that solemn stillness which is spoken of. We are tempted to think of Hogarth's enraged Musician," whose rapture is destroyed by an agglomeration of sounds, each of which, taken separately, might have been, by an effort of patience, endured.

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For the eye we are presented with" the slow winding off of the cattle;" "the plodding pace of the returning plowman;""the fading of the landscape;" and "the moon, discovering, by her light,

1

a tower mantled with ivy." Of these images, criticism is content to admit the propriety, whilst she denies their origi nality, reserving to herself the right of stricture, on the plan according to which they are assembled, and the style in which they are drawn..

If the images above recited are traced to the poets from whom they are taken, we shall not always perceive them to have found their way into the Elegy written in a Country Church-yard, in an improved state. Of the curfew, as heard by a man of meditation, we have the following circumstantiation in Milton's "Penseroso :"

Oft, on a plat of rising ground,
I hear the far-off curfew sound;
Over some wide-water'd shore,
Swinging slow with sullen roar.

To this characteristical figuring, Gray has thought proper to substitute the conceit of Dante; according to which the cur

few is made to toll requiems to the day newly deceased: a fancy more subtle than solid, and to which the judgment, if reconciled at all, is reconciled by effort.

Of evening the approach is described in the Elegy, as a prose-muser would have described it: "The “The glimmering

landscape fades on the sight;" let us hear Thomson :

A faint erroneous ray,

Glanc'd from th' imperfect surfaces of things,
Flings half an image on the straining eye;
While wavering woods, and villages, and streams,
And rocks-are, all, one swimming scene,
Uncertain if beheld.'

Or, more compressed in the thought, and invested with the sweetness of rhime;

And Collins :

Be mine the hut that views

Hamlets brown, and dim-discover'd spires,
And hears their simple bell, and marks, o'er all,
Thy dewy fingers draw

The gradual dusky veil.1

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The idea of making sounds of a certain kind give a relief (to speak in the language of artists) to silence, is not new. Thus wrote Collins in 1746:

Now air is hush'd, save where the weak-ey'd bat,
With short shrill shriek, flits by on leathern wing;
Or, where the beetle winds

His small, but sullen horn.2

The beetle of Collins and Gray is the

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grey fly" of Milton, that, in the pensive man's ear, “winds his sultry horn." Collins has changed the epithet into sullen, by a happy misremembrance.

In Parnell, in place of " ivy mantling