les,
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--

"I feel the gales that from ye blow
A momentary bliss bestow,
As, waving fresh their gladsome wing,
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring."

Dr Johnson makes a peculiarly poor and unworthy objection to the next
stanza of the poem. Speaking of the address to the Thames--

"Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen
Full many a sprightly race;"

he says, "Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself."
He should have left this objection to those wretched _mechanical_
critics who abound in the present day. He forgot that in his own
"Rasselas" he had invoked the Nile, as the great "Father of waters,"
to tell, if, in any of the provinces through which he rolled, he did
not hear the language of distress. Critics, like liars, should have
good memories.

His remark that the "Prospect of Eton College" suggests nothing to
Gray which every beholder does not equally think and feel, is, in
reality, a compliment to the simplicity and naturalness of the strain.
Common thought and feeling crystalised, is the staple of much of our
best poetry. Gray says in a poetical way, what every one might have
thought and felt, but no one but he could have so beautifully