Leasowes is, that to the passionate lover, the wonted haunts of the beloved object give gratification, when from these haunts she is absent.

They tell me, my favourite maid,
The pride of that valley, is gone:
Alas! where with her I have strayed,
I could wander with pleasure, alone.

The image is one that pleases for the time: but, reflected from the lakes of Hagley, which is only a few miles off, it meets the eye with its form inverted, and yet it pleases still.

The shades of Hagley now have lost their boast,-
How, in the world, to me a desart grown,

Abandoned and alone,

Without my sweet companion, can I live? *

There are frames of mind that suit either view. It is not in poetry as in logic.

Shenstone. Absense.

2 Littleton. Monody.

Here two contradictories may dwell together, each of equal authority with its opposite.

Though poetry may be justifiable in presenting us with opposite views, each of which may be true for the time, yet she ought to beware, when she is dealing out her universals, that she offer us not a relative in place of an absolute truth. It is in this view that Gray is censurable in the present instance. That the sympathies of friends give ease to a dying man, may be, in general, as just a sentiment as that they give him pain ; that they soften his anguish, as that they point it: but, here, the enunciation is didactic. The poet speaks in no character, and to no particular class, but brings forth the sentiment in the form of a position; and, considered as a position, it is not true.

The third line of the stanza contains

an hyperbole, which is out-hyperboled in the fourth:

Even from the grave the voice of Nature cries:
Even in our ashes live their wonted fires.

-a position at which Experience revolts, Credulity hesitates, and even Fancy stares. He who can bring himself to believe, that he has heard the voice of Nature crying from the of a dead man, is in train to assent, in time, to the propo

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grave

sition, that " even in our ashes live their wonted fires:" though Friendship should caution him to stop short, and Pleasantry suggest to him that surface-views are oft delusive; and that he may find himself, on this occasion, if he goes farther on, incedere per IGNES suppositos cineri DOLOSÒ. But I am ashamed of the expenditure of precious time, incurred by the examination of a proposition contrary to all truth, abstract or poetical ; which Madness cannot shape itself to

the conviction of; nor elongations, more than Pindaric, bring imagination in contact with, even for a moment.

What makes this conceit (if by the name conceit may be called that which cannot be conceived) the more unpardonable in Gray is, that, (by a process of judgment the reverse of that formerly commemorated, with regard to the closing line of a stanza in his Ode on Spring) he introduced the line, in which it is conveyed, in place of another; and as an improvement of the original thought. The stanza, in its first state,

a

concluded with this line,

"Awake and faithful to her wonted fires;"

which, if we chasten still farther, upon the suggestion of Mr Mason, into

Awake and faithful to her first desires;

I Mason.

we shall then, instead of two hyperboles, have only one, lengthened by the addition of a trail. I think Mason has informed us, that he advised him to alter the line. But Gray could not afford to want it for here, it is probable, he once intended to conclude the Elegy; `and this mode of " twirling off the thought into an apophthegm," he thought the most imposing he was likely to find.

Gray has, in a note on this line, endeavoured to justify the thought by a reference to a passage in Petrarch. But no authority can give dignity to nonsense, or transmute false taste into true. As to the writings of Petrarch, it may be allowed that, in them, as in most of the Italian poetry, many instances of conceit occur. Yet more have been fancied than found. A poet who possesses this vein in himself, imagines that he meets with it wherever he goes. Thoughts apparelled in the simplest garb, appear to

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