‘Fair laughs the Morn, and soft the Zephyr blows, While proudly riding o’er the azure realm, In gallant trim the gilded Vessel goes; Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm; Regardless of the sweeping Whirlwind’s sway, That, hush’d in grim repose, expects his evening-prey.’ The ‘Elegy’ is an expression of the common heart, though of that common heart purified and ennobled, and therefore it is of universal appeal; of the Odes it is true to-day as in Gray’s lifetime that they are vocal only to the intellectuals. But apart from its merits all Gray’s poetry has a special interest owing to its place at the meeting-point of the Augustan and Romantic schools. On the one hand it retains the notion of poetry as a happy combination of words. Gray, in a letter to Mason, says: ‘Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical, is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry’; adding ‘this I have always aimed at and could never attain.’ Gray’s instrument was always the file; he had no taste for the verse cast at a jet; and so he could accuse Collins of having a bad ear. In the second place, there are signs in Gray of that first-hand interest in nature and that respect for the whole of human nature, and not only its intellect, which was soon to inspire Cowper and Wordsworth. Perhaps Gray is at his modernest in the ‘Ode on Vicissitude,’ and in that impromptu couplet which Norton Nicholls preserved: ‘There pipes the woodlark, and the song-thrush there Scattering his loose notes in the waste of air’— if not most modern of all in that quatrain of the ‘Elegy’ which Gray’s feeling for unity expunged, but which we cannot spare: ‘There scatter’d oft the earliest of the year, By Hands unseen, are show’rs of violets found: The red-breast loves to build and warble there, And little footsteps lightly print the ground.’