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 expressed. To the spirited translations from the Norse and Welsh, the only objection urged by Dr Johnson is, that their "language is unlike the language of other poets"--an objection which would tell still more powerfully against Milton, Collins, and Young, not to speak of the "chartered libertines" of our more modern song. But a running growl of prejudice is heard in every sentence of Gray's Life by Johnson, and tends far more to injure the critic than the poet.