to the
imagination, its quiet movement and its music, its pensiveness and its
regrets, have been given a form more lasting than bronze. Perhaps the poem
owes a part of its popularity to the fact that it is a great homily,
though a homily transfigured. But then does not _Hamlet_ owe a great part
of its popularity to the fact that it is (among other things) a great
blood-and-thunder play with duels and a ghost?

One of the so-called mysteries of literature is the fact that Gray, having
written so greatly, should have written so little. He spoke of himself as
a "shrimp of an author," and expressed the fear that his works might be
mistaken for those of "a pismire or a flea." But to make a mystery of the
indolence of a rather timid, idle, and unadventurous scholar, who was
blessed with more fastidiousness than passion, is absurd. To say perfectly
once and for all what one has to say is surely as fine an achievement as
to keep restlessly trying to say it a thousand times over. Gray was no
blabber. It is said that he did not even let his mother and his aunts know
that he wrote poetry. He lacked boldness, volubility and vital energy. He
stood aside from life. He would not even take money from his publishers
for his poetry. No wonder that he earned the scorn of Dr. Johnson, who
said of him to Boswell, "Sir, he was dull in his company, dull in his
closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many
think him great." Luckily, Gray's reserve tempted him into his own heart
and into external nature for safety and consolation. Johnson could see in
him only a "mechanical poet." To most of us he seems the first natural
poet in modern literature.

XI.--ASPECTS OF SHELLEY

(1) THE CHARACTER HALF-COMIC

Shelley is one of the most difficult of men of genius to portray. It is
easy enough to attack him or defend him--to damn him as an infidel or to
praise him because he made Harriet Westbrook so miserable that she threw
herself into the Serpentine. But this is an entirely different thing from
recapturing the likeness of the man from the nine hundred and ninety-nine
anecdotes that are told of him. These for the most part leave him with an
air of absurdity. In his habit of ignoring facts he appeals again and
again to one's sense of the comic, like a drunken man who fails to see the
kerb or who walks into a wall. He was indeed drunken with doctrine. He
lived almost as much from doctrine as from passion. He pursued th