On his return to England, Gray lived for a short time at Stoke Poges, where he wrote his “Ode on Eton,” and probably sketched his “Elegy,” which, however, was not finished till 1750, eight years later.  During the latter years of his shy and scholarly life he was Professor of Modern History and Languages at Cambridge, without any troublesome work of lecturing to students.  Here he gave himself up to study and to poetry, varying his work by “prowlings” among the manuscripts of the new British Museum, and by his “Lilliputian” travels in England and Scotland.  He died in his rooms at Pembroke College in 1771, and was buried in the little churchyard of Stoke Poges.

WORKS OF GRAY.  Gray’s Letters, published in 1775, are excellent reading, and his Journal is still a model of natural description; but it is to a single small volume of poems that he owes his fame and his place in literature.  These poems divide themselves naturally into three periods, in which we may trace the progress of Gray’s emancipation from the classic rules which had so long governed English literature.  In the first period he wrote several minor poems, of which the best are his “Hymn to Adversity” and the odes “To Spring” and “On a Distant Prospect of Eton College.”  These early poems reveal two suggestive things:  first, the appearance of that melancholy which characterizes all the poetry of the period; and second, the study of nature, not for its own beauty or truth, but rather as a suitable background for the play of human emotions.

The second period shows the same tendencies more strongly developed.  The “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1750), the most perfect poem of the age, belongs to this period.  To read Milton’s “Il Penseroso” and Gray’s “Elegy” is to see the beginning and the perfection of that “literature of melancholy” which largely occupied English poets for more than a century.  Two other well-known poems of this second period are the Pindaric odes, “The Progress of Poesy” and “The Bard.”  The first is strongly suggestive of Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast,” but shows Milton’s influence in a greater melody and variety of expression.  “The Bard” is, in every way, more romantic and original.  An old minstrel, the last of the Welsh singers, halts King Edward and his army in a wild mountain pass, and with fine poetic frenzy prophesies the terror and desolation which must ever follow the tyrant.  From its first line, “Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!” to the end, when the old bard plunges from his lofty crag and disappears in the river’s flood, the poem thrills with the fire of an ancient and noble race of men.  It breaks absolutely with the classical school and proclaims a literary declaration of independence.

In the third period Gray turns momentarily from his Welsh material and reveals a new field of romantic interest in two Norse poems, “The Fatal Sisters” and “The Descent of Odin” (1761).  Gray translated his material from the Latin, and though these two poems lack much of the elemental strength and grandeur of the Norse sagas, they are remarkable for calling attention to the unused wealth of literary material that was hidden in Northern mythologv.  To Gray and to Percy (who published his Northern Antiquities in 1770) is due in large measure the profound interest in the old Norse sagas which has continued to our own day.