in this verse.  It is a poem of beauty and sorrow that cannot be symbolized by such public figures as Cromwell and Milton.  Here the genius of the parting day, and all that it means to the imagination, its quiet movement and its music, its pensiveness and its regrets, have been given a form more lasting than bronze.  Perhaps the poem owes a part of its popularity to the fact that it is a great homily, though a homily transfigured.  But then does not Hamlet owe a great part of its popularity to the fact that it is (among other things) a great blood-and-thunder play with duels and a ghost?

One of the so-called mysteries of literature is the fact that Gray, having written so greatly, should have written so little.  He spoke of himself as a “shrimp of an author,” and expressed the fear that his works might be mistaken for those of “a pismire or a flea.”  But to make a mystery of the indolence of a rather timid, idle, and unadventurous scholar, who was blessed with more fastidiousness than passion, is absurd.  To say perfectly once and for all what one has to say is surely as fine an achievement as to keep restlessly trying to say it a thousand times over.  Gray was no blabber.  It is said that he did not even let his mother and his aunts know that he wrote poetry.  He lacked boldness, volubility and vital energy.  He stood aside from life.  He would not even take money from his publishers for his poetry.  No wonder that he earned the scorn of Dr. Johnson, who said of him to Boswell, “Sir, he was dull in his company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere.  He was dull in a new way, and that made many think him great.”  Luckily, Gray’s reserve tempted him into his own heart and into external nature for safety and consolation.  Johnson could see in him only a “mechanical poet.”  To most of us he seems the first natural poet in modern literature.

XI.—­ASPECTS OF SHELLEY

(1) THE CHARACTER HALF-COMIC

Shelley is one of the most difficult of men of genius to portray.  It is easy enough to attack him or defend him—­to damn him as an infidel or to praise him because he made Harriet Westbrook so miserable that she threw herself into the Serpentine.  But this is an entirely different thing from recapturing the likeness of the man from the nine hundred and ninety-nine anecdotes that are told of him.  These for the most part leave him with an air of absurdity.  In his habit of ignoring facts he appeals again and again to one’s sense of the comic, like a drunken man who fails to see the kerb or who walks into a wall.  He was indeed drunken with doctrine.  He lived almost as much from doctrine as from passion.  He pursued theories as a child chases butterflies.  There is a story told of his Oxford days which shows how eccentrically his theories converted themselves into conduct.  Having been reading Plato with Hogg, and having soaked himself in the theory of pre-existence