Air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat,
  With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing,
        Or where the beetle winds
        His small but sullen horn.

He speaks here, not in the stiffness of rhetoric, but in the liberty of a new mood, never, for all he knew or cared, expressed before.  As far as all the rest of his work is concerned, his passion for style is more or less wasted.  But the Ode to Evening justifies both his pains and his indolence.  As for the pains he took with his work, we have it on the authority of Thomas Warton that “all his odes ... had the marks of repeated correction:  he was perpetually changing his epithets.”  As for his indolence, his uncle, Colonel Martin, thought him “too indolent even for the Army,” and advised him to enter the Church—­a step from which he was dissuaded, we are told, by “a tobacconist in Fleet Street.”  For the rest, he was the son of a hatter, and went mad.  He is said to have haunted the cloisters of Chichester Cathedral during his fits of melancholia, and to have uttered a strange accompaniment of groans and howls during the playing of the organ.  The Castle of Indolence was for Collins no keep of the pleasures.  One may doubt if it is ever this for any artist.  Did not even Horace attempt to escape into Stoicism?  Did not Stevenson write Pulvis et Umbra?

Assuredly Gray, though he was as fastidious in his appetites as Collins was wild, cannot be called in as a witness to prove the Castle of Indolence a happy place.  “Low spirits,” he wrote, when he was still an undergraduate, “are my true and faithful companions; they get up with me, go to bed with me, make journeys and return as I do; nay, and pay visits, and will even affect to be jocose, and force a feeble laugh with me.”  The end of the sentence shows (as do his letters, indeed, and his verses on the drowning of Horace Walpole’s cat) that his indolent melancholy was not without its compensations.  He was a wit, an observer of himself and the world about him, a man who wrote letters that have the genius of the essay.  Further, he was Horace Walpole’s friend, and (while his father had a devil in him) his mother and his aunts made a circle of quiet tenderness into which he could always retire.  “I do not remember,” Mr. Gosse has said of Gray, “that the history of literature presents us with the memoirs of any other poet favoured by nature with so many aunts as Gray possessed.”  This delicious sentence contains an important criticism of Gray.  Gray was a poet of the sheltered life.  His genius was shy and retiring.  He had no ambition to thrust himself upon the world.  He kept himself to himself, as the saying is.  He published the Elegy in a Country Churchyard in 1751 only because the editors of the Magazine of Magazines had got hold of a copy and Gray was afraid that they would publish it first.  How lethargic a poet Gray was may be gathered from the fact that he began