In 1757 Walpole issued, as the first book from his new printing-press at Strawberry Hill, a quarto pamphlet entitled ‘Odes by Mr. Gray,’ with a vignette on the title-page of his Gothick castle, and a motto from Pindar ΦΩΝΑΝΤΑ ΣΥΝΕΤΟΙΣΙ which Gray englished as ‘vocal to the intelligent alone.’ It contained two odes, here called simply Ode I and Ode II, ‘The Progress of Poesy’ and ‘The Bard.’ The first of these odes is undoubtedly Gray’s masterpiece, and deserves all the study that can be given to it. The subject, that of the great power of poetry, was one very near to Gray’s heart as well as to his mind, and the scheme is well thought out. There is no feeling of strain in any part of it. Personification, with Gray generally a sign of strain, is kept within the limits approved by the great masters. Thus we have ‘antic Sports and blue-eyed Pleasures’ just as in the ‘Allegro’ we have ‘Jest and youthful Jollity’; but there is no elaborate series of abstract figures like that in the two stanzas on the Passions in the Ode on Eton College. This fashionable personification perhaps justified itself to Gray as a combination of the imaginative method of Shakespeare with the clear definition of Dryden. What in Shakespeare would have been a metaphor, hinted at and immediately succeeded by another, becomes too often with Gray a substantial allegorical personage. There seems to us to-day something essentially unpoetical, because artificial, in the posturing groups of Furies and Graces, and we wonder that Gray with his fine critical sense did not feel this. We must recognise, however, that whenever he is deeply moved he escapes from the snare. Two consecutive stanzas in the ‘Ode on Vicissitude’ show how his verse becomes more direct as it deepens in feeling. ‘Still, where rosy Pleasure leads, See a kindred Grief pursue; Behind the steps that Misery treads, Approaching Comfort view: The hues of Bliss more lightly glow, Chastised by sabler tints of woe, And blended form, with artful strife, The strength and harmony of Life. See the Wretch, that long has tost On the thorny bed of Pain, At length repair his vigour lost, And breathe and walk again: The meanest flowret of the vale, The simplest note that swells the gale, The common Sun, the air, the skies, To him are opening Paradise.’