18. Gray’s +Elegy+ took him seven years to write; it contains thirty-two stanzas; and Mr Palgrave says “they are perhaps the noblest stanzas in the language.” General Wolfe, when sailing down to attack Quebec, recited the Elegy to his officers, and declared, “Now, gentlemen, I would rather be the author of that poem than take Quebec.” Lord Byron called the Elegy “the corner-stone of Gray’s poetry.” Gray ranks with Milton as the most finished workman in English verse; and certainly he spared no pains. Gray said himself that “the style he aimed at was extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical;” and this style, at which he aimed, he succeeded fully in achieving. One of the finest stanzas in the whole Elegy is the last, which the writer omitted in all the later editions:-- “There scattered oft, the earliest of the year, By hands unseen, are showers of violets found; The red-breast loves to build and warble there, And little footsteps lightly print the ground.” 19. WILLIAM COLLINS (+1721-1759+), one of the truest lyrical poets of the century, was born at Chichester on Christmas-day, 1721. He was educated at Winchester School; afterwards at Queen’s, and also at Magdalen College, Oxford. Before he left school he had written a set of poems called +Persian Eclogues+. He left the university with a reputation for ability and for indolence; went to London “with many projects in his head and little money in his pocket;” and there found a kind and fast friend in Dr Johnson. His +Odes+ appeared in 1747. The volume fell stillborn from the press: not a single copy was sold; no one bought, read, or noticed it. In a fit of furious despair, the unhappy author called in the whole edition and burnt every copy with his own hands. And yet it was, with the single exception of the songs of Burns, the truest poetry that had appeared in the whole of the eighteenth century. A great critic says: “In the little book there was hardly a single false note: there was, above all things, a purity of music, a clarity of style, to which I know of no parallel in English verse from the death of Andrew Marvell to the birth of William Blake.” Soon after this great disappointment he went to live at Richmond, where he formed a friendship with Thomson and other poets. In 1749 he wrote the +Ode on the Death of Thomson+, beginning-- “In yonder grave a Druid lies”-- one of the finest of his poems. Not long after, he was attacked by a disease of the brain, from which he suffered, at intervals, during the remainder of his short life. He died at Chichester in 1759, at the age of thirty-eight. 20. Collins’s best poem is the +Ode to Evening+; his most elaborate, the +Ode on the Passions+; and his best known, the +Ode+ beginning-- “How sleep the brave, who sink to rest By all their country’s wishes blessed!”