With all his learning and genius, he has done little. His letters and poems remind you of a few scattered leaves, surviving the conflagration of the Alexandrian library. The very popularity of the scraps which such a writer leaves, secures the torments of Tantalus to his numerous admirers in all after ages. His letters, in their grace, freedom, minuteness of detail, occasional playfulness, delicious _asides_ of gossip, and easy vigour of description, are more worthy of his powers, as a whole, than his poetry. The poetic fragments he has left are rarely of such merit as to excite any wish that they had been finished. His genius, although true and exquisite, was limited in its range, and hidebound in its movements. You see his genius, like a child, always casting a look of terror round on its older companion and guardian--his taste. Like Campbell, "he often spreads his wings grandly, but shrinks back timidly to his perch again, and seems afraid of the shadow of his own fame." Within his own range, however, he is as strong as he is delicate and refined. His two principal Odes have, as we hinted, divided much the opinion of critics. Dr Johnson has assailed them in his worst style of captious and word-catching criticism. Now, that there is much smoke around their fire, we grant. But we argue that there is genuine fire amidst their smoke,--first, from the fact that so many of their lines, such as, "The bloom of young Desire, and purple light of Love;" "The terror of his beak, and lightnings of his eye;" "Their feather-cinctured chiefs, and dusky loves;" "Sailing with supreme dominion Through the azure deep of air;" "Beneath the good how far, but far above the great" "High-born Hoel's harp, and soft Llewellyn's lay," are so often and admiringly quoted; and because, secondly, we can trace the influence of the "Progress of Poetry," and of the "Bard," on much of the higher song that has succeeded,--on the poetry of Bowles, 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."