Thy son is gone. He rests among the dead.
The swarm that in thy noontide beam were born?
Gone to salute the rising morn.

Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows,
While proudly riding o'er the azure realm,
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes;

Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm ;
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway,
That, hushed in grim repose, expects his evening prey.

'Fill high the sparkling bowl,

The rich repast prepare;

Reft of a crown, he yet may share the feast :

Close by the regal chair

Fell Thirst and Famine scowl

A baleful smile upon their baffled guest. Heard ye the din of battle bray,

Richard II.

the Wars of the Roses

Elegy written in a Country Churchyard.

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower,
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,

The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,

The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed, The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,

No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire's return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,

Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke; How jocund did they drive their team a-field!

How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Let not ambition mock their useful toil,

Their homely joys, and destiny obscure ;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Await alike the inevitable hour.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Nor you, ye Proud, impute to these the fault,
If Memory o'er their tomb no trophies raise,
Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

Can storied urn or animated bust

Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,

Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed Or waked to extasy the living lyre:

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page, Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll; Chill Penury repressed their noble rage,

And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem, of purest ray serene,

The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

The applause of listening senates to command, The threats of pain and ruin to despise,

To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,

And read their history in a nation's eyes,

Their lot forbad: nor circumscribed alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbad to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind.

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide, To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame, Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride

With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never learned to stray; Along the cool sequestered vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Yet even these bones from insult to protect,
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhimes and shapeless sculpture decked,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Their name, their years, spelt by the unlettered Muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply:

And many a holy text around she strews,
That teach the rustic moralist to die.

For who, to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind?

On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
Some pious drops the closing eye requires ;
E'en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires.

For thee, who, mindful of the unhonoured 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:
'Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Brushing with hasty steps the dews away,
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.
There at the foot of yonder nodding beech,
That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,
His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
And pore upon the brook that babbles by.
'Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,
Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove;
Now drooping, woful, wan, like one forlorn,

Or crazed with care, or crossed in hopeless love. 'One morn I missed him on the customed hill, Along the heath and near his favourite tree; Another came; nor yet beside the rill,

Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;

'The next, with dirges due, in sad array,

Slow through the churchway path we saw him borne ; Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.'

The Epitaph.

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth,
A Youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown:
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy marked him for her own.
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,

Heaven did a recompence as largely send :
He gave to Misery all he had, a tear;

He gained from Heaven ('twas all he wished) a friend.

No further seek his merits to disclose,

Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose,)

The bosom of his Father and his God.

The first draft of the fifteenth stanza, instead of the names of Hampden, Milton, and Cromwell, has those of Cato, Tully, and Cæsar. In Gray's first MS. this stanza followed the twenty-fifth: 'Him have we seen the greenwood side along, While o'er the heath we hied, our labour done, Oft as the woodlark piped her farewell song, With wistful eyes pursue the setting sun.'

In early editions this fine stanza preceded the epitaph:
'There scattered oft, the earliest of the year,

By hands unseen, are showers of violets found;
The redbreast loves to build and warble there,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground.'
Another verse in Mason's manuscript of the poem runs:
'Hark! how the sacred calm, that breathes around,
Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease;
In still small accents whispering from the ground
A grateful earnest of eternal peace.'

The Alliance of Education and Government.
As sickly plants betray a niggard earth,
Whose barren bosom starves her generous birth,
Nor genial warmth, nor genial juice retains
Their roots to feed, and fill their verdant veins :
And, as in climes where Winter holds his reign,
The soil, though fertile, will not teem in vain,

Forbids her germs to swell, her shades to rise, Nor trusts her blossoms to the churlish skies. So draw mankind in vain the vital airs, Unformed, unfriended by those kindly cares That health and vigour to the soul impart,

Spread the young thought, and warm the opening heart;
So fond instruction on the growing powers
Of nature idly lavishes her stores,

If equal justice, with unclouded face,
Smile not indulgent on the rising race,
And scatter with a free, though frugal hand,
Light golden showers of plenty o'er the land;
But tyranny has fixed her empire there,

To check their tender hopes with chilling fear,
And blast the blooming promise of the year.
This spacious animated scene survey,
From where the rolling orb that gives the day,
His sable sons with nearer course surrounds,
To either pole, and life's remotest bounds,
How rude soe'er the exterior form we find,
Howe'er opinion tinge the varied mind,
Alike to all the kind impartial Heaven

The sparks of truth and happiness has given :
With sense to feel, with memory to retain,
They follow pleasure, and they fly from pain;
Their judgment mends the plan their fancy draws,
The event presages, and explores the cause;
The soft returns of gratitude they know,
By fraud elude, by force repel the foe;
While mutual wishes mutual woes endear,
The social smile, the sympathetic tear.

Say, then, through ages by what fate confined,
To different climes seem different souls assigned?
Here measured laws and philosophic ease
Fix and improve the polished arts of peace.
There industry and gain their vigils keep,
Command the winds, and tame the unwilling deep.
Here force and hardy deeds of blood prevail;
There languid pleasure sighs in every gale.

Oft o'er the trembling nations from afar

Has Scythia breathed the living cloud of war;
And, where the deluge burst, with sweepy sway,
Their arms, their kings, their gods were rolled away.
As oft have issued, host impelling host,

The blue-eyed myriads from the Baltic coast,
The prostrate south to the destroyer yields
Her boasted titles, and her golden fields;
With grim delight the brood of winter view
A brighter day, and heavens of azure hue,
Scent the new fragrance of the breathing rose,
And quaff the pendent vintage as it grows.
Proud of the yoke, and pliant to the rod,
Why yet does Asia dread a monarch's nod,
While European freedom still withstands

The encroaching tide that drowns her lessening lands,
And sees far off, with an indignant groan,
Her native plains and empires once her own?
Can opener skies and suns of fiercer flame
O'erpower the fire that animates our frame;
As lamps, that shed at eve a cheerful ray,
Fade and expire beneath the eye of day?
Need we the influence of the northern star
To string our nerves and steel our hearts to war?
And where the face of nature laughs around,
Must sickening virtue fly the tainted ground?
Unmanly thought! what seasons can control,

What fancied zone can circumscribe the soul,

Who, conscious of the source from whence she springs,

By reason's light, on resolution's wings,

Spite of her frail companion, dauntless goes

O'er Libya's deserts and through Zembla's snows?
She bids each slumbering energy awake,
Another touch, another temper take,

Suspends the inferior laws that rule our clay;
The stubborn elements confess her sway;
Their little wants, their low desires, refine,
And raise the mortal to a height divine.

Not but the human fabric from the birth
Imbibes a flavour of its parent earth.
As various tracts enforce a various toil,
The manners speak the idiom of their soil.
An iron race the mountain-cliffs maintain,
Foes to the gentler genius of the plain;
For where unwearied sinews must be found,
With side-long plough to quell the flinty ground,
To turn the torrent's swift-descending flood,
To brave the savage rushing from the wood,
What wonder, if to patient valour trained,
They guard with spirit what by strength they gained;
And while their rocky ramparts round they see,
The rough abode of want and liberty,
(As lawless force from confidence will grow)
Insult the plenty of the vales below?
What wonder, in the sultry climes that spread,
Where Nile, redundant o'er his summer bed,
From his broad bosom life and verdure flings,
And broods o'er Egypt with his watery wings,
If with adventurous oar and ready sail,
The dusky people drive before the gale;
Or on frail floats to neighbouring cities ride,
That rise and glitter o'er the ambient tide? . . .
Mason preserved as much too beautiful to be lost' a couplet
intended to have been included in this fragment' or unfinished
poem:
When love could teach a monarch to be wise,
And gospel-light first dawned from Bullen's eyes.

The earlier Lives of Gray and editions of his works by Mason and by Mitford were superseded by Mr Gosse's study in the Men of Letters' series (1882) and his edition of the works in prose and verse, including three hundred and forty-nine letters (4 vols. 1884). See also Matthew Arnold's introduction to the selection in Ward's English Poets, vol. iii. An elaborate edition of Gray's letters was begun by Mr D. C. Tovey in 1900.

William Collins,

accounted by most modern critics the only great English lyrist of the eighteenth century, was the son of a well-to-do hatter at Chichester, and there he was born on the Christmas of 1721. He received a liberal education, first in the prebendal school of Chichester, then as a scholar on the foundation of Winchester College, and afterwards at Queen's College and Magdalen College in Oxford, where he was distinguished for 'his genius and indolence,' but took his degree of B.A. in November 1743. Joseph Warton and Gilbert White of Selborne were fellow-students and friends. He left college abruptly, and afterwards visited an uncle, at that time with his regiment in Flanders. On his return to England, Collins thought of entering the Church, but he soon abandoned this design, and applied himself

to literature. While at college he published his Persian Eclogues (1742), afterwards republished with the title of Oriental Eclogues, and next year his Epistle to Sir Thomas Hanmer on his Edition of Shakspeare. Collins, as Johnson remarks, 'had many projects in his head.' He planned several

tragedies, and issued Proposals for a History of the Revival of Learning, a work which he never accomplished. He was full of high hopes and magnificent schemes, but wanted steadiness of purpose and application. Through Johnson he obtained an advance from a bookseller for a projected translation of Aristotle's Poetics. In 1746 he published his Odes, which were purchased by Millar the bookseller, but failed to attract attention. The poet in disgust burnt the unsold copies, sank under the disappointment, and became still more indolent and dissipated. The fine promise of his youth, his ardour and ambition, melted away under this baneful and depressing influence. Once again, however, he strung his lyre. Thomson died in 1748: Collins-who lived some time at Richmond-knew and loved him, and seems to have been thus sketched by Thomson in a stanza of the Castle of Indolence:

Of all the gentle tenants of the place,
There was a man of special grave remark;
A certain tender gloom o'erspread his face,
Pensive, not sad, in thought involved, not dark.
Ten thousand glorious systems would he build,
Ten thousand great ideas filled his mind;

But with the clouds they fled, and left no trace behind. When Thomson died Collins quitted Richmond, and commemorated his brother-poet in a touching ode. Among his friends was also Home, the author of Douglas, to whom he addressed an ode, found unfinished after his death, on the Superstitions of the Highlands. It was communicated by Carlyle of Inveresk to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and printed in their Transactions in 1788, not without alterations and additions by Carlyle and Henry Mackenzie. Collins loved to dwell on these dim and visionary objects, and the compliment he pays to Tasso might almost be applied to himself:

Prevailing poet, whose undoubting mind

Believed the magic wonders which he sung.

In the midst of the poet's difficulties and distresses, his uncle died (1749) and left him about £2000; 'a sum,' says Johnson, which Collins could scarcely think exhaustible, and which he did not live to exhaust.' He had sunk into a state of nervous prostration; all hope or power of exertion had fled. Johnson met him one day, carrying with him as he travelled an English Testament : 'I have but one book,' said Collins, 'but it is the best.' A voyage to France failed to dissipate his melancholy, and for a time he was the inmate of a madhouse. In his later days he was tended by his sister in Chichester. He used, when at

liberty, to wander day and night among the aisles and cloisters of Chichester Cathedral, accompanying the music with sobs and moans. After passing six years in this condition, he died in utter obscurity on 12th June 1759. Two odes written in his later years, on the Music of the Grecian Theatre and the Bell of Aragon, have been lost.

For long the Oriental Eclogues were the most esteemed of Collins's works; he himself thought otherwise, and the world soon came to be of his opinion. Southey remarked that, though utterly neglected on their first appearance, the Odes of Collins in one generation and without any adventitious aid, were acknowledged to be the best of their kind in the language. Silently and imperceptibly they had risen by their own buoyancy, and their power was felt by every reader who had any true poetic feeling.' This true estimate is fully established, though there is in Collins some lack of human interest and of action. The Eclogues are free from the occasional obscurity and remoteness of the Odes, though they too are rather tame, and, with the exception of the second, rather pointless and defective in story. Collins, like Gray, holds a middle position between the school of Pope and the school of Wordsworth. In his maturer work he is almost completely free from the so-called 'poetic diction' of the eighteenth century. He has not the passionate feeling for nature of later poets, but his feeling is at least real and not conventional. In respect of natural poetic gifts, Johnson, in spite of prejudices, recognised in Collins something lacking in Gray, whom it was usual to set beside Collins or even rank as his superior. Coleridge and Mrs Browning place him above Gray. Mr Swinburne vehemently denounces all linking of the two contemporaries together; as a lyric poet, Gray is not worthy to unloose Collins's shoe-latchet. Collins had, and Gray had not, the gift of lyric song, a purity of music and clarity not found from Marvell to Blake. "The muse gave verse to Collins: she did but give luck to Gray.' Collins could put more music into a note than could all the rest of his generation into all the labours of their lives. But his range was narrow. He had not Goldsmith's power of compelling human emotion; and his choice of subjects, and his subtler modes of treatment, debar him from the popularity of the author of the Elegy His most highly finished ode is that To Evening, which is unsurpassed for exalted tone and exquisite diction. The ode on The Passions has merits of a different order, but shows genius of even wider scope. The allegorical character of this ode and its companion pieces, To Liberty, To Mercy, and To Pity, removes them from direct human sympathy. The Ode to Liberty first after Milton 'blows the clarion of republican faith.' No poet made more use of metaphors and personification. Pity is presented with 'eyes of dewy light;' and Danger is described with the distinctness of sculpture :

Danger, whose limbs of giant mould
What mortal eye can fixed behold?
Who stalks his round, an hideous form,
Howling amidst the midnight storm,
Or throws him on the ridgy steep

Of some loose hanging rock to sleep.

That Collins was capable of simplicity and pathos is shown by his two most popular poems, On the Death of the Poet Thomson, and the ode quoted below beginning 'How sleep the brave.'

The scene or the following eclogue, the second of the series, is the desert at midday :

Hassan; or the Camel-driver.

In silent horror, o'er the boundless waste,
The driver Hassan with his camels past;
One cruse of water on his back he bore,
And his light scrip contained a scanty store;
A fan of painted feathers in his hand,
To guard his shaded face from scorching sand.
The sultry sun had gained the middle sky,
And not a tree and not an herb was nigh;

The beasts with pain their dusty way pursue,
Shrill roared the winds, and dreary was the view!
With desperate sorrow wild, the affrighted man
Thrice sighed, thrice struck his breast, and thus began:
'Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day,
When first from Schiraz' walls I bent my way!

'Ah! little thought I of the blasting wind, The thirst or pinching hunger that I find! Bethink thee, Hassan, where shall thirst assuage, When fails this cruse, his unrelenting rage? Soon shall this scrip its precious load resign, Then what but tears and hunger shall be thine?

'Ye mute companions of my toils, that bear
In all my griefs a more than equal share!
Here, where no springs in murmurs break away,
Or moss-crowned fountains mitigate the day,
In vain ye hope the green delights to know,
Which plains more blest or verdant vales bestow;
Here rocks alone and tasteless sands are found,
And faint and sickly winds for ever howl around.

Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day,
When first from Schiraz' walls I bent my way!

'Curst be the gold and silver which persuade
Weak men to follow far fatiguing trade!
The lily peace outshines the silver store,
And life is dearer than the golden ore;
Yet money tempts us o'er the desert brown,
To every distant mart and wealthy town.
Full oft we tempt the land, and oft the sea;
And are we only yet repaid by thee?
Ah why was ruin so attractive made,

Or why fond man so easily betrayed?
Why heed we not, whilst mad we haste along,
The gentle voice of Peace, or Pleasure's song?
Or wherefore think the flowery mountain's side,
The fountain's murmurs, and the valley's pride,
Why think we these less pleasing to behold
Than dreary deserts, if they lead to gold?

Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day,
When first from Schiraz' walls I bent my way!

'O cease, my fears! All frantic as I go, When thought creates unnumbered scenes of woe, What if the lion in his rage I meet!

Oft in the dust I view his printed feet;
And fearful oft, when Day's declining light
Yields her pale empire to the mourner Night,
By hunger roused he scours the groaning plain,
Gaunt wolves and sullen tigers in his train;
Before them Death with shrieks directs their way,
Fills the wild yell, and leads them to their prey.

Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day, When first from Schiraz' walls I bent my way!

'At that dead hour the silent asp shall creep, If aught of rest I find, upon my sleep;

Or some swoln serpent twist his scales around,
And wake to anguish with a burning wound.
Thrice happy they, the wise contented poor,
From lust of wealth and dread of death secure !
They tempt no deserts, and no griefs they find;
Peace rules the day where reason rules the mind.
Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day,
When first from Schiraz' walls I bent my way!

'O hapless youth! for she thy love hath won, The tender Zara, will be most undone. Big swelled my heart, and owned the powerful maid, When fast she dropped her tears, as thus she said: "Farewell the youth whom sighs could not detain, Whom Zara's breaking heart implored in vain! Yet as thou go'st, may every blast arise Weak and unfelt as these rejected sighs! Safe o'er the wild no perils mayst thou see,

No griefs endure, nor weep, false youth, like me."
O let me safely to the fair return,

Say with a kiss, she must not, shall not mourn;
O let me teach my heart to lose its fears,
Recalled by Wisdom's voice and Zara's tears.'

He said, and called on Heaven to bless the day When back to Schiraz' walls he bent his way.