"Foe to loud praise, and friend to learned ease,
Content with science in the vale of peace."
77. _These bones_. "The bones of these. So _is_ is often used in
Latin, especially by Livy, as in v. 22: '_Ea_ sola pecunia,' the
money derived from that sale, etc." (Hales).
84. _That teach_. Mitford censures _teach_ as ungrammatical; but it
may be justified as a "construction according to sense."
85. Hales remarks: "At the first glance it might seem that _to dumb
Forgetfulness a prey_ was in apposition to _who_, and the meaning
was, 'Who that now lies forgotten,' etc.; in which case the second
line of the stanza must be closely connected with the fourth; for the
question of the passage is not 'Who ever died?' but 'Who ever died
without wishing to be remembered?' But in this way of interpreting
this difficult stanza (i.) there is comparatively little force in the
appositional phrase, and (ii.) there is a certain awkwardness in
deferring so long the clause (virtually adverbal though apparently
coördinate) in which, as has just been noticed, the point of the
question really lies. Perhaps therefore it is better to take the
phrase _to dumb Forgetfulness a prey_ as in fact the completion of
the predicate _resign'd_, and interpret thus: Who ever resigned this
life of his with all its pleasures and all its pains to be utterly
ignored and forgotten?=who ever, when resigning it, reconciled
himself to its being forgotten? In this case the second half of the
stanza echoes the thought of the first half."
We give the note in full, and leave the reader to take his choice of
the two interpretations. For ourself, we incline to the first rather
than the second. We prefer to take _to dumb Forgetfulness a prey_ as
appositional and proleptic, and not as the grammatical complement of
_resigned_: Who, yielding himself up a prey to dumb Forgetfulness,
ever resigned this life without casting a longing, lingering look
behind?
90. _Pious_ is used in the sense of the Latin _pius_. Ovid has "piae
lacrimae." Mitford quotes Pope, _Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady_, 49:
"No friend's complaint, no kind domestic tear
Pleas'd thy pale ghost, or grac'd thy mournful bier;
By foreign hands thy dying eyes were clos'd."
"In this stanza," says Hales, "he answers in an exquisite manner the
two questions, or rather the one question twice repeated, of the
preceding stanza.... What he would say is that every one while a
spark of life yet remains in him yearns for some kindly loving
remembrance; nay, even after the spark is quenched, even when all is
dust and ashes, that yearning must still be felt."
91, 92. Mitford paraphrases the couplet thus: "The voice of Nature
still cries from the tomb in the language of the epitaph inscribed
upon it, which still endeavours to connect us with the living; the
fires of former affection are still alive beneath our ashes."
Cf. Chaucer, _C. T._ 3880:
"Yet in our ashen cold is fire yreken."
Gray himself quotes Petrarch, _Sonnet_ 169:
"Ch'i veggio nel pensier, dolce mio fuoco,
Fredda una lingua e due begli occhi chiusi,
Rimaner doppo noi pien di faville,"
translated by Nott as follows:
"These, my sweet fair, so warns prophetic thought,
Clos'd thy bright eye, and mute thy poet's tongue,
E'en after death shall still with sparks be fraught,"
the "these" meaning his love and his songs concerning it. Gray
translated this sonnet into Latin elegiacs, the last line being
rendered,
"Ardebitque urna multa favilla mea."
93. On a MS. variation of this stanza given by Mitford, see p. 80,
footnote.