And the bard, after discovering all the miseries of unhappy grandeur,
and murmuring at this delay to the house of his friend, exclaims--

Oh if these ills the price of power advance,
Check not my speed where social joys invite!

The silent departure of the poetical spectre is fine:

The troubled vision cast a mournful glance,
And sighing, vanish'd in the shades of night.

And to prove that the subject of this elegy thus arose to the poet's
fancy, he has himself commemorated the incident that gave occasion to
it, in the opening:--

On distant heaths, beneath autumnal skies,
Pensive I saw the circling shades descend;
Weary and faint, I heard the storm arise,
While the sun vanish'd like a faithless friend.

_Elegy_ vii.

The Fifteenth Elegy, composed "in memory of a private family in
Worcestershire," is on the extinction of the ancient family of the Penns
in the male line.[54] Shenstone's mother was a Penn; and the poet was
now the inhabitant of their ancient mansion, an old timber-built house
of the age of Elizabeth. The local description was a real scene--"the
shaded pool"--"the group of ancient elms"--"the flocking rooks," and the
picture of the simple manners of his own ancestors, were realities; the
emotions they excited were therefore genuine, and not one of those
"mockeries" of amplification from the crowd of verse-writers.

The Tenth Elegy, "To Fortune, suggesting his Motive for repining at her
Dispensations," with his celebrated "Pastoral Ballad, in four parts."
were alike produced by what one of the great minstrels of our own times
has so finely indicated when he sung--

The secret woes the world has never known;
While on the weary night dawn'd wearier day,
And bitterer was the grief devour'd alone.

In this Elegy Shenstone repines at the dispensations of Fortune, not for
having denied him her higher gifts, nor that she compels him to

Check the fond LOVE OF ART that fired my veins;

nor that some "dull dotard with boundless wealth" finds his "grating
reed" preferred to the bard's, but that the "tawdry shepherdess" of this
dull dotard, by her "pride," makes "the rural thane" despise the poet's
Delia.

Must Delia's softness, elegance, and ease,
Submit to Marian's dress? to Marian's gold?
Must Marian's robe from distant India please?
The simple fleece my Delia's limbs infold!

Ah! what is native worth esteemed of clowns?
'Tis thy false glare,