simpler structure; and one may argue whether turning back from the thoughtless world to praise again the "cool sequester'd vale of life" and then appending "the happy idea of the hoary-headed swain, &c." does really improve the poem structurally. Its method is, however, more acceptable in that now the reflections are imbedded in "drama" (or at least in narrative), and the total effect is more pleasing to present-day readers since we escape, or seem to escape, from the cool universality of humble life to a focus on an individual grief. To end on a grim note of generalized "doom," would have given the poem a temporary success such as it deserved; and it must be acknowledged that the knell-like sound of "No more ... No more" (lines 20, 21) echoed and re-echoed for decades through the imaginations of gloom-fed poets. But Gray, although an undoubted "graveyard" poet, is no mere graveyard poet: he stands above and apart from the lot of them, and he was not content to end despondently in a descending gloom. His, as he told West, in a celebrated letter, was a "white melancholy, or rather leucocholy"; and he wrote of "lachrymae rerum" rather than of private mordant sorrows.

The poem is couched in universals: Gray writes in "a" country churchyard, and the actual Stoke Poges, dear and lovely as it doubtless was to Gray, clings to the fame of the poem almost by accident. And yet, by a sort of paradox, this "universal" poem in its setting and mood is completely English. One could go too far from home for examples of distinction—for the polar stars of the rude forefathers—just as one could err by excess of "commonplace" reflections. Some such idea encouraged Gray to modify his fifteenth quatrain, which in the Eton MS reads (the first line has partly perished from folding of the paper):

The substitution of English names is an obvious attempt to bring truth closer to the souls of his readers by use of "domestica facta" and the avoidance of school-boy learning.

All these changes illustrate the quality of Gray's curious felicity. His assault on the reader's sensibilities was organized and careful: here is no sign of that contradiction in terms, "unpremeditated art." He probably did not work on the poem so long as historians have said he did, but he scanted neither time nor attention. Mason thought the poem begun and perhaps finished in 1742, and he connected its somberness with Gray's great sorrow over the death of his close friend Richard West. All this seems more than doubtful: to Dr. Thomas Wharton in September 1746 Gray mentioned recently composing "a few autumnal verses," and there is no real evidence of work on the poem before this time. Walpole evidently inclined to 1746 as the date of commencement, and it may be pointed out that Mason himself is not so sure of 1742 as have been his Victorian successors. All he says is, "I am inclined to believe that the Elegy ... was begun, if not concluded, at this time [1742] also." Gray's reputation for extreme leisurely composition depends largely on the "inclination" to believe that the "Elegy" was begun in 1742 and on a later remark by Walpole concerning Gray's project for a History of Poetry. In a letter of 5 May 1761 Walpole joked to Montagu saying that Gray, "if he rides Pegasus at his usual foot-pace, will finish the first page two years hence." Not really so slow as this remark suggests, Gray finally sent his "Elegy" to Walpole in June of 1750, and in December he sent perhaps an earlier form of the poem to Dr. Wharton. Naturally delighted with the perfected utterance of this finely chiseled work, these two friends passed it about in manuscript, and allowed copies to be taken.

Publication, normally abhorrent to Gray, thus became inevitable, though