Through the azure deep of air;"
"Beneath the good how far, but far above the great"
"High-born Hoel's harp, and soft Llewellyn's lay,"

are so often and admiringly quoted; and because, secondly, we can
trace the influence of the "Progress of Poetry," and of the "Bard," on
much of the higher song that has succeeded,--on the poetry of Bowles,
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Campbell, and Shelley. Gray was not a sun
shining in his strength, but he was the morning star, prognosticating
the coming of a warmer and brighter poetic day.

He that can see no merit in the "Ode on the Distant Prospect of Eton
College," can surely never have been a boy. The boy's heart beats in
its every line, and yet all the experiences of boyhood are seen and
shown in the sober light of those

"Years which bring the philosophic mind."

Here lies the complex charm of the poem. The unthinking gaiety of
boyhood, its light sports, its airy gladness, its springy motions, the
"tears forgot as soon as shed," the "sunshine of the breast" of that
delightful period--are contrasted with the still and often sombre
reflection, the grave joys, the carking cares, the stern concentred
passions, the serious pastimes, the spare but sullen and burning
tears, the sad smiles of manhood; and contrasted by one who is
realising both with equal vividness and intensity--because he is in
age a man, and in memory and imagination an Eton schoolboy still. The
breezes of boyhood return and blow on a head on which gray hairs are
beginning "here and there" to whiten; and he cries--