"Alse other wonders of the sportive shears, Fair nature mis-adorning, there were found: Globes, spiral columns, pyramids, and piers, With sprouting urns and budding statues crowned; And horizontal dials on the ground, In living box by cunning artists traced; And gallies trim, on no long voyage bound But by their roots there ever anchored fast, All were their bellying sails out-spread to every blast." [36] "Essays on Men and Manners," Shenstone's Works, Vol. II. Dodsley's edition. [37] "On Modern Gardening," Works of the Earl of Orford, London, 1798, Vol. II. [38] Graves, "Recollections of Shenstone," 1788. [39] "Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. 271. [40] "Life of Shenstone." [41] See _ante_, p. 90, for his visits to Gilbert West at Wickham. [42] See especially "A Pastoral Ode," and "Verses Written toward the Close of the Year 1748." [43] "A Description of the Leasowes by R. Dodsley," Shenstone's Works, Vol. II, pp. 287-320 (3d ed.) This description is accompanied with a map. For other descriptions consult Graves' "Recollections," Hugh Miller's "First Impressions of England," and Wm. Howitt's "Homes of the Poets" (1846), Vol. I. pp. 258-63. The last gives an engraving of the house and grounds. Miller, who was at Hagley--"The British Tempe"-and the Leasowes just a century after Shenstone began to embellish his paternal acres, says that the Leasowes was the poet's most elaborate poem, "the singularly ingenious composition, inscribed on an English hillside, which employed for twenty long years the taste and genius of Shenstone." [44] See "Lady Luxborough's Letters to Shenstone," 1775, for a long correspondence about an urn which _she_ was erecting to Somerville's memory. She was a sister of Bolingbroke, had a seat at Barrels, and exchanged visits with Shenstone. [45] "Letter to Nichols," June 24, 1769. [46] Dryden's "Annus Mirabilis," Davenant's "Gondibert," and Sir John Davies' "Nosce Teipsum" were written in this stanza, but the universal currency of Gray's poem associated it for many years almost exclusively with elegiac poetry. Shenstone's collected poems were not published till 1764, though some of them had been printed in Dodsley's "Miscellanies." Only a few of his elegies are dated in the collected editions (Elegy VIII, 1745; XIX, 1743; XXI, 1746), but Graves says that they were all written before Gray's. The following lines will recall to every reader corresponding passages in Gray's "Churchyard": "O foolish muses, that with zeal aspire To deck the cold insensate shrine with bays! "When the free spirit quits her humble frame To tread the skies, with radiant garlands crowned; "Say, will she hear the distant voice of Fame, Or hearing, fancy sweetness in the sound?" --_Elegy II_. "I saw his bier ignobly cross the plain." --_Elegy III_. "No wild ambition fired their spotless breast." --_Elegy XV_.