powerfully against Milton, Collins, and Young, not to speak of the
"chartered libertines" of our more modern song. But a running growl of
prejudice is heard in every sentence of Gray's Life by Johnson, and
tends far more to injure the critic than the poet.

In his "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," Gray has caught,
concentred, and turned into a fine essence, the substance of a
thousand meditations among the tombs. One of its highest points of
merit, conceded by Dr Johnson, is essentially the same with which he
had found fault in the "Ode to Eton College." "The poem abounds with
images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which
every bosom returns an echo." Everything is in intense keeping. The
images are few, but striking; the language is severely simple; the
thought is at once obvious and original, at once clear and profound,
and many of the couplets seem carefully and consciously chiselled for
immortality, to become mottoes for every churchyard in the kingdom,
and to "teach the rustic moralist to die," while the country remains
beautiful, and while death continues to inspire fear. And with what
daring felicity of genius does the author introduce, ere the close, a
living but anonymous figure amidst the company of the silent dead, and
contrive to unite the interest of a personal story, the charm of a
mystery, and the solemnity of a moral meditation, into one fine whole!
We know of but one objection of much weight to this exquisite elegy.
There is scarcely the faintest or most faltering allusion to the
doctrine of the resurrection. Death has it all his own way in this
citadel of his power. The poet never points his finger to the distant
horizon, where life and immortality are beginning to colour the clouds
with the promise of the eternal morning. The elegy might almost have
been written by a Pagan. In this point, Beattie, in his "Hermit," has
much the advantage of his friend Gray; for _his_ eye is anointed to