STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY
It is a cool afternoon in July, and the shadows are falling eastward on
fields of waving grain and lawns of emerald velvet. Overhead a few light
clouds are drifting, and the green boughs of the great elms are gently
stirred by a breeze from the west. Across one of the more distant fields
a flock of sable rooks--some of them fluttering and cawing--wings its
slow and melancholy flight. There is the sound of the whetting of a
scythe, and, near by, the twittering of many birds upon a cottage roof.
On either side of the country road, which runs like a white rivulet
through banks of green, the hawthorn hedges are shining and the bright
sod is spangled with all the wild-flowers of an English summer. An odour
of lime-trees and of new-mown hay sweetens the air for many miles
around. Far off, on the horizon's verge, just glimmering through the
haze, rises the imperial citadel of Windsor. And close at hand a little
child points to a gray spire[1] peering out of a nest of ivy, and tells me
that this is Stoke-Pogis church.
[1] In Gray's time there was no spire on the church--nor is the spire an
improvement to the tower.
If peace dwells anywhere upon the earth its dwelling-place is here. You
come into this little churchyard by a pathway across the park and
through a wooden turnstile; and in one moment the whole world is left
behind and forgotten. Here are the nodding elms; here is the yew-tree's
shade; here "heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap." All these
graves seem very old. The long grass waves over them, and some of the
low stones that mark them are entirely shrouded with ivy. Many of the
"frail memorials" are made of wood. None of them is neglected or
forlorn, but all of them seem to have been scattered here, in that sweet
disorder which is the perfection of rural loveliness. There never, of
course, could have been any thought of creating this effect; yet here it
remains, to win your heart forever. And here, amid this mournful beauty,
the little church itself nestles close to the ground, while every tree
that waves its branches around it, and every vine that clambers on its
surface, seems to clasp it in the arms of love. Nothing breaks the
silence but the sighing of the wind in the great yew-tree at the church
door,--beneath which was the poet's favourite seat, and where the brown
needles, falling, through many an autumn, have made a dense carpet on
the turf. Now and then there is a faint rustle in the ivy; a fitful
bird-note serves but to deepen the stillness; and from a rose-tree near
at hand a few leaves flutter down, in soundless benediction on the dust
beneath.
Illustration: "Stoke-Pogis Church."
Gray was laid in the same grave with his mother, "the careful, tender
mother of many children, one alone of whom," as he wrote upon her
gravestone, "had the misfortune to survive her." Their tomb--a low,
oblong, brick structure, covered with a large slab--stands a few feet
away from the church wall, upon which is a small tablet to denote its
place. The poet's name has not been inscribed above him. There was no
need here of "storied urn or animated bust." The place is his monument,
and the majestic Elegy--giving to the soul of the place a form of
seraphic beauty and a voice of celestial music--is his immortal epitaph.
"There scatter'd oft, the earliest of ye Year,
By hands unseen are showers of vi'lets found;
The Redbreast loves to build & warble there,
And little Footsteps lightly print the ground."
There is a monument to Gray in Stoke Park, about two hundred yards from
the church; but it seems commemorative of the builder rather than the
poet. They intend to set a memorial window in the church, to honour him,
and the visitor finds there a money-box for the reception of
contributions in aid of this pious design. Nothing will be done amiss
that serves to direct closer attention to his life. It was one of the
best lives ever recorded in the history of literature. It was a life
singularly pure, noble, and beautiful. In two qualities, sincerity and
reticence, it was exemplary almost beyond a parallel; and those are
qualities that literary character in the present day has great need to
acquire. Gray was averse to publicity. He did not sway by the censure of
other men; neither did he need their admiration as his breath of life.
Poetry, to him, was a great art, and he added nothing to literature
until he had first made it as nearly perfect as it could be made by the
thoughtful, laborious exertion of his best powers, superadded to the
spontaneous impulse and flow of his genius. More voluminous writers,
Charles Dickens among the rest, have sneered at him because he wrote so
little. The most colossal form of human complacency is that of the
individual who thinks all other creatures inferior who happen to be
unlike himself. This reticence on the part of Gray was, in fact, the
emblem of his sincerity and the compelling cause of his imperishable
renown. There is a better thing than the great man who is always
speaking; and that is the great man who only speaks when he has a great
word to say. Gray has left only a few poems; but of his principal works
each is perfect in its kind, supreme and unapproachable. He did not test
merit by reference to ill-formed and capricious public opinion, but he
wrought according to the highest standards of art that learning and
taste could furnish. His letters form an English classic. There is no
purer prose in existence; there is not much that is so pure. But the
crowning glory of Gray's nature, the element that makes it so
impressive, the charm that brings the pilgrim to Stoke-Pogis church to
muse upon it, was the self-poised, sincere, and lovely exaltation of its
contemplative spirit. He was a man whose conduct of life would, first of
all, purify, expand, and adorn the temple of his own soul, out of which
should afterward flow, in their own free way, those choral harmonies
that soothe, guide, and exalt the human race. He lived before he wrote.
The soul of the Elegy is the soul of the man. It was his thought--which
he has somewhere expressed in better words than these--that human beings
are only at their best while such feelings endure as are engendered when
death has just taken from us the objects of our love. That was the point
of view from which he habitually looked upon the world; and no man who
has learned the lessons of experience can doubt that he was right.
Gray was twenty-six years old when he wrote the first draft of the
Elegy. He began that poem in 1742, at Stoke-Pogis, and he finished and
published it in 1751. No visitor to this churchyard can miss either its
inspiration or its imagery. The poet has been dead more than a hundred
years, but the scene of his rambles and reveries has suffered no
material change. One of his yew-trees, indeed, much weakened with age,
was some time since blown down, in a storm, and its fragments have been
carried away. The picturesque manor house not far distant was once the
home of Admiral Penn, father of William Penn the famous Quaker.[1]
[1] William Penn and his children are buried in the little Jordans
graveyard, not many miles away. The visitor to Stoke-Pogis should not
omit a visit to Upton church, Burnham village, and Binfield. Pope lived
at Binfield when he wrote his poem on Windsor Forest. Upton claims to
have had a share in the inspiration of the Elegy, but Stoke-Pogis was
unquestionably his place of residence when he wrote it. Langley Marish
ought to be visited also, and Horton--where Milton wrote "L'Allegro,"
"II Penseroso," and "Comus." Chalfont St. Peter is accessible, where
still is standing the house in which Milton finished _Paradise Lost_ and
began _Paradise Regained;_ and from there a short drive will take you to
Beaconsfield, where you may see Edmund Burke's tablet, in the church,
and the monument to Waller, in the churchyard.
All the trees of the region have, of course, waxed and expanded,--not
forgetting the neighbouring beeches of Burnham, among which he loved to
wander, and where he might often have been found, sitting with his book,
at some gnarled wreath of "old fantastic roots." But in its general
characteristics, its rustic homeliness and peaceful beauty, this
"glimmering landscape," immortalised in his verse, is the same on which
his living eyes have looked. There was no need to seek for him in any
special spot. The house in which he once lived might, no doubt, be
discovered; but every nook and vista, every green lane and upland lawn
and ivy-mantled tower of this delicious solitude is haunted with his
presence.
The night is coming on and the picture will soon be dark; but never
while memory lasts can it fade out of the heart. What a blessing would
be ours, if only we could hold forever that exaltation of the spirit,
that sweet, resigned serenity, that pure freedom from all the passions
of nature and all the cares of life, which comes upon us in such a place
as this! Alas, and again alas! Even with the thought this golden mood
begins to melt away; even with the thought comes our dismissal from its
influence. Nor will it avail us anything now to linger at the shrine.
Fortunate is he, though in bereavement and regret, who parts from beauty
while yet her kiss is warm upon his lips,--waiting not for the last
farewell word, hearing not the last notes of the music, seeing not the
last gleams of sunset as the light dies from the sky. It was a sad
parting, but the memory of the place can never now be despoiled of its
loveliness. As I write these words I stand again in the cool and dusky
silence of the poet's church, with its air of stately age and its
fragrance of cleanliness, while the light of the western sun, broken
into rays of gold and ruby, streams through the painted windows and
softly falls upon the quaint little galleries and decorous pews; and,
looking forth through the low, arched door, I see the dark and
melancholy boughs of the dreaming yew-tree, and, nearer, a shadow of
rippling leaves in the clear sunshine of the churchway path. And all the
time a gentle voice is whispering, in the chambers of thought--
"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: "Old Church."