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 recompense as largely send:
He gave to Misery, all he had, a tear,
He gained from Heaven ('twas all he wished) a friend.
No farther 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.
[Illustration: THE COUNTRY CHURCHYARD]
Thomas Gray was born in London on the twenty-sixth of December,
1716, and received his education at Cambridge, where he lived most
of his quiet life and where he died in 1771. He was a small and
graceful man with handsome features and rather an effeminate
appearance, always dressed with extreme care. The greater part of
his life was spent in neatly furnished rooms among his books, for
he was a hard student, and became noted as one of the first
scholars of his time. Among his friends he was witty and
entertaining, but among strangers, quiet and reserved, almost
timid. He loved his mother devotedly, and after her death he kept
her dress neatly folded in his trunk, always by him. Innocent,
well-meaning, gentle and retiring, he drew many warm friends to
him, though his great learning and his fondness for giving
information made many people think him something of a prig.
It might be considered a weakness in the _Elegy_ that it drifts
into an elegy on the writer, who becomes lost in the pathos of his
own sad end. Yet, knowing the man as we do, we can understand his
motives and forgive the seeming selfishness. He is not the only
poet whose own sorrows, real or imaginary, were his greatest
inspiration.
The metre of the _Elegy_ had been used, before Gray's time, by Sir
John Davies for his _Immortality of the Soul_, Sir William Davenant
in his _Gondibert_, and Dryden in his _Annus Mirabilis_, and
others; but in no instance so happily as here by Gray. In the
_Elegy_ the quatrain has not the somewhat disjunctive and isolating
effect that it has in some other works where there is continuous
argument or narrative that should run on with as few metrical
hindrances as possible. It is well adapted to convey a series of
solemn reflections, and that is its work in the _Elegy_.