Dying unpublished and in obscurity, David Gray never reached the audience that he was convinced would rank him high among English poets. He did, however, catch the attention of some influential men of letters, principally Richard Monckton Milnes and Sydney Dobell; and Robert Buchanan's sensitive and self-effacing biography of his friend, appearing in the same issue of the Cornhill magazine that contained obituaries of Thackeray by Dickens and Trollope, helped widen that small circle of admirers. Gray scarcely achieved an authentic individual note in the brief time allotted him; his diction is too often artificial, as it is in the worst of his models, and his tone is too often maudlin. Yet his language can be extraordinarily deft and his observation of natural beauty remarkably acute, and his work continues to find readers.

Gray's career was brief and pathetic. The oldest of eight children of a hand-loom weaver...