For hear, alas, the dreadful truth, Nor hear it with a frown: Thou can'st not make the tea so fast As I can gulp it down. VIII GRAY WRITES THE ELEGY Recently I was conversing with a practical man of affairs who had just returned from his first visit to Europe. Art galleries had proved tiresome and Westminster Abbey had bored him. But there was one place that he had determined to see and see it he did. "What place was that?" I asked. "Stoke Pogis," was the reply. Is not this answer indicative of the attitude of thousands who can never forget the exquisite charm cast over their youth by the melancholy beauty of the _Elegy in a Country Church-yard_? If fame was the end of General Wolfe's ambition, he was wise in saying that he would rather have written the _Elegy_ than be able to take Quebec on the morrow; for of all English poems the _Elegy_ is the most popular and widely known; it is the flower of the "literature of melancholy." The _Elegy_ is the glorification of the obscure; therein lies its popularity. The most of us are obscure. The _Elegy_ flatters us by suggesting that we might have swayed the rod of empire or "waked to ecstasy the living lyre," if we had had the chance,--or, what we think is more likely the explanation, if we had not had a saner insight into the values of life than the Miltons and Cromwells. Stoke Pogis is always associated with the name of Gray. It is a village, if such it may be called, between London and Windsor Castle. The church is "on a little level space about four miles north of the Thames at Eton. From the neighborhood of the church no vestige of hamlet or village is visible, and the aspect of the place is slightly artificial, like a rustic church in a park on a stage. The traveler almost expects to see the grateful peasantry of an opera, cheerfully habited, make their appearance, dancing on the greensward."