are observers of nature and it pleases them to recognize their own thoughts and feelings expressed with a power and justice they are themselves incapable of giving them. As the revolving seasons come and go their charm, their beauty, their majesty or their terror is more keenly perceived and acknowledged because of some familiar line of the poet that involuntarily arises in the memory. It is Thomson's faithfulness to nature that ranks "The Seasons" so high in English poetry, in spite of its many faults. He says:

I solitary court

The inspiring breeze, and meditate the book
Of Nature, ever open; aiming thence,

Warm from the heart, to pour the moral song.

And it is because he does this that for more than a century and a half it has been one of the first volumes of poetry placed in the hands of youth.

One aspect of Thomson's poetry has been well summed up in a verse by his friend, Lord Lyttle

ton:

For his chaste muse employed her heaven taught lyre,
None but the noblest passions to inspire.

Not one immoral, one corrupted thought,

One line, which, dying, he could wish to blot.

Dr. Johnson, whose life of the poet is not very friendly, his dislike being probably founded on the fact that he was a Scotchman, considered him very original, both in thought and execution, and this judgment is never likely to be impugned. The great mass of his writings, his tragedies and all his poems save two, has long since been forgotten, but "The Seasons" and "Castle of Indolence easily maintain their place in English literature.

EVERYBODY knows, or at least everybody ought to know, by heart Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." In fact, its lines and phrases are so inlaid in our colloquial speech that one memorizes much of it involuntarily. No poem in the language has been so much quoted, not any of Shakespeare's or Pope's. It contains but one hundred and twenty-eight lines, and seventy-one of them will be found in Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations," which only gives those that are the most commonly quoted. There is scarcely a line in it from beginning to end that has not been used at one time or another by some writer or speaker the better to express or illustrate his thought. This shows how deeply the poem is impressed on the mind and heart of every reader. Doctor Johnson, who greatly dis

liked Gray, once said to Boswell there were only two good stanzas in the elegy, and when Boswell asked him to point them out he quoted the stanza beginning "For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey as one, and said he had forgotten

the other. But when he came to write "The Lives of the Poets" and express himself critically, while sharply censuring Gray's other poems he said:

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.

This touches the true merit of the poem; its imagery and sentiment find a response in every mind and heart.

Gray was perhaps the most fastidious poet that ever lived, and this accounts for the scantiness of his poetical performances. All that he wrote, or rather all that he published, can be put in a small volume; but he wrote with immense industry. Not even Pope rewrote and polished his lines as Gray did. He followed the advice of Horace and kept his poem for nine years before publishing it.

The "Elegy" was begun in 1742, and it was not published until 1750, and then it appeared without the poet's

zines of the day.

consent, in one of the magaThe authorized edition came out in 1751. As it appeared in 1750 the poem contained two stanzas that have since been universally admired, but which the poet omitted from the authorized version through mere hypercriticism. The following are the lines unfamiliar probably to a great many readers :

There scattered oft, the earliest of the year,

By hands unseen, are showers of violets found;
The red-breast loves to build and warble there,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground.

Him have we seen the greenwood side along,
While o'er the heath we hied, our labors done,
Oft as the woodlark piped her farewell song,

With wistful eyes pursue the setting sun,

Of the first of these stanzas James Russell Lowell said that" Gray might run his pen through this, but he could not obliterate it from the memory of men. Wordsworth himself never acchieved a simplicity of language so pathetic in suggestion, so musical in movement as this." And Lowell is not alone in this opinion. Wherever they are known and read these verses have been as much admired as any other in the poem.

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