know well that the movement away from the so-called Classicism was begun
long before he died. The Romantic element in his poetry is not obvious;
only the close observer detects it, and then only in a few of the poems.
The Pindaric odes exhibit a treatment that is Romantic, and the Norse
and Welsh adaptations are on subjects that are Romantic. But we must go
to his letters to find proof positive of his sympathy with the breaking
away from Classicism. Here are records of a love of outdoors that
reveled in mountain-climbing and the buffeting of storms. Here are
appreciations of Shakespeare and of Milton, the like of which were not
often proclaimed in his generation. Here is ecstatic admiration of
ballads and of the Ossian imitations, all so unfashionable in the
literary culture of the day. While dates disprove Lowell's statement in
his essay on Gray that "those anti-classical yearnings of Gray began
after he had ceased producing," it is certain that very little of his
poetic work expressed these yearnings. "Elegance, sweetness, pathos, or
even majesty he could achieve, but never that force which vibrates in
every verse of larger moulded men." Change Lowell's word "could" to
"did," and this sentence will serve our purpose here.

Our interest in Gray's Romanticism must confine itself to the two odes
from the Old Norse. It is to be noted that the first transplanting to
English poetry of Old Norse song came about through the scholar's
agency, not the poet's. It was Gray, the scholar, that made "The Descent
of Odin" and "The Fatal Sisters." They were intended to serve as
specimens of a forgotten literature in a history of English poetry. In
the "Advertisement" to "The Fatal Sisters" he tells how he came to give
up the plan: "The Author has long since drop'd his design, especially
after he heard, that it was already in the hands of a Person well
qualified to do it justice, both by his taste, and his researches into
antiquity." Thomas Warton's _History of English Poetry_ was the