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Show The Poet Gritv'a Unhappy Life. Gray's was, in many ways, a melancholy melan-choly life. His vitality waa low, and Rich happiness as he enjoyed was of u languid kind. Physically and emotionally emotion-ally he was unfit to cope with realities, and this though he never felt the touch of some of tho most crushing evils (hat humanity sustains. Ho was never poor, he was never despised, he had many devoted de-voted friends; but on the other hand he had a wretched and diseased constitution, he suffered from all sorts of prostrating complaints, from imaginary insolences, violent antipathies and want of sympathy. sym-pathy. Fame such as is rarely accorded to man came to him; he was accepted as without doubt the first of living English Eng-lish poets; and he took no kind or pleasure pleas-ure in it. He waB horrified to find himself him-self a celebrity; he refused to be poet laureate; he refused honorary degrees; when at Cambridge the young scholars are 6aid to have left their dinners to see him as he passed in the street; it was a sincere pain to him. Cooper counterbalanced counter-balanced his fits of unutterable melancholy melan-choly by his hours of tranquil serenity over teacups and muffins and warm coal fires, with the curtains drawn close. Johnson enlivened his boding depression by tyrannizing over an adoring circle. But Gray's only compensations were his friends. Any one who knowB Gray's letters to and about his young friend Bonstetteten, knows how close and warm it is possible for friendsliip to be. Arthur Ar-thur Benson in Macmillan's Magazine. |