The book was brought, and other stanzas read, which seemed to give him pleasure.

Surely it is not a slight thing to have satisfied, so far as the world they were about to leave was concerned, the latest aspirations of such a hero as Wolfe, and such a statesman as Webster !

The very popularity and general acceptance of so brief a poem discourages any multiplied quotations from it. The opening description at once puts the village life of England before us, even though the very commencing word "The curfew," is a recollection of obsolete habits. In the second stanza, is there not twilight in the very sounds?

"Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds."

All is so purely appropriate, without being for an instant tame or undignified, which is the great difference to my mind between Gray and more modern schools. Then we have the picture of the specific subject of the poem taken more closely :

"Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,

Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,

The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep."

The author of the "Pursuits of Literature," to whom I have already referred, terms the following

the great stanza, and I am inclined to think not improperly:

"The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Await alike th' inevitable hour:

The paths of glory lead but to the grave."

All sermons are here concentrated; and how every expression comes up to the full dignity of the most solemn of all human themes, without the slightest strain or inflation.

You would justly blame me, if I forbore to remind you how it is said, with most eloquent truth :

66

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre."

I do not give the couplet on the gem, because I might be told that "purest ray serene" is what we should have called at school a botch; but there is nothing imperfect in the flower :

"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

Many of you will be sufficiently familiar with the "village Hampden" and the "mute inglorious Milton," who follow next.

There is much tender beauty in these two stanzas :

"For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,

This pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing ling'ring look behind?"

Alliteration is surely employed with much effect in that last line.

"On some fond breast the parting soul relies,

Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
Ev'n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
Ev'n in our ashes live their wonted fires."

I must not pursue the description of the carecrazed or love-crossed youth, and his epitaph. I would rather ask you to judge what the excellence of the finished poem must be, from which the author deliberately rejected two such stanzas as these, after they had been once inserted :—

"Hark, how the sacred calm that breathes around,
Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease,
In still small accents breathing from the ground
A grateful earnest of eternal peace.

And this, descriptive of the rustic tomb of the village scholar :

"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.

Such, then, were the melancholy, but gentle reveries of the poet, to whom we must now bid