far back as 1746--Mason says it was begun in August, 1742--and did not finish it until June 12, 1750. Probably there is no other short poem in English literature which was brooded over for so many seasons. Nor was there ever a greater justification for patient brooding. Gray in this poem liberated the English imagination after half a century of prose and rhetoric. He restored poetry to its true function as the confession of an individual soul. Wordsworth has blamed Gray for introducing, or at least, assisting to introduce, the curse of poetic diction into English literature. But poetic diction was in use long before Gray. He is remarkable among English poets, not for having succumbed to poetic diction, but for having triumphed over it. It is poetic feeling, not poetic diction, that distinguishes him from the mass of eighteenth-century writers. It is an interesting coincidence that Gray and Collins should have brought about a poetic revival by the rediscovery of the beauty of evening, just as Mr. Yeats and "A.E." brought about a poetic revival in our own day by the rediscovery of the beauty of twilight. Both schools of poetry (if it is permissible to call them schools) found in the stillness of the evening a natural refuge for the individual soul from the tyrannical prose of common day. There have been critics, including Matthew Arnold, who have denied that the _Elegy_ is the greatest of Gray's poems. This, I think, can only be because they have been unable to see the poetry for the quotations. No other poem that Gray ever wrote was a miracle. _The Bard_ is a masterpiece of imaginative rhetoric. But the _Elegy_ is more than this. It is an autobiography and the creation of a world for the hearts of men. Here Gray delivers the secret doctrine of the poets. Here he escapes out of the eighteenth century into immortality. One realizes what an effort it must have been to rise above his century when one reads an earlier version of some of his most famous lines: Some village Cato (----) with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest; Some Cæsar guiltless of his country's blood. Could there be a more effective example of the return to reality than we find in the final shape of this verse? Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.