“‘For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,’” etc.

“In all Gray’s odes,” wrote Johnson, “there is a kind of cumbrous splendor which we wish away. . .  These odes are marked by glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments; they strike rather than please; the images are magnified by affectation; the language is labored into harshness.  The mind of the writer seems to work with unnatural violence. . .  His art and his struggle are too visible and there is too little appearance of ease and nature. . .  In the character of his ‘Elegy,’ I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claims to poetical honors.  The ‘Churchyard’ abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”

There are noble lines in Gray’s more elaborate odes, but they do make as a whole that mechanical, artificial impression of which Johnson complains.  They have the same rhetorical ring, the worked-up fervor in place of genuine passion, which was noted in Collins’ ode “On the Passions.”  Collins and Gray were perpetually writing about the passions; but they treated them as abstractions and were quite incapable of exhibiting them in action.  Neither of them could have written a ballad, a play, or a romance.  Their odes were bookish, literary, impersonal, retrospective.  They had too much of the ichor of fancy and too little red blood in them.

But the “Elegy” is the masterpiece of this whole “Il Penseroso” school, and has summed up for all English readers, for all time, the poetry of the tomb.  Like the “Essay on Man,” and “Night Thoughts” and “The Grave,” it is a poem of the moral-didactic order, but very different in result from these.  Its moral is suffused with emotion and expressed concretely.  Instead of general reflections upon the shortness of life, the vanity of ambition, the leveling power of death, and similar commonplaces, we have the picture of the solitary poet, lingering among the graves at twilight (hora datur quieti), till the place and the hour conspire to work their effect upon the mind and prepare it for the strain of meditation that follows.  The universal appeal of its subject and the perfection of its style have made the “Elegy” known by heart to more readers than any other poem in the language.  Parody is one proof of celebrity, if not of popularity, and the “sister odes” were presently parodied by Lloyd and Colman in an “Ode to Obscurity” and an “Ode to Oblivion.”  But the “Elegy” was more than celebrated and more than popular; it was the most admired and influential poem of the generation.  The imitations and translations of it are innumerable, and it met with a response as immediate as it was general.[32] One effect of this was to consecrate the ten-syllabled quatrain to elegiac uses.  Mason