DAVID GRAY.*

IT is curious to mark the nervous qualifications with which cultivated men express, nay even indulge, their belief that they have found a new poet. They seem to know at there is a soft credulous part in every man's nature on which spurious poetry is peculiarly apt to seize, and they dread the imputation of feeding their mind on meretricious poetry as one of the sevea deadly intellectual sins—which, indeed, it is. To

go into captivity to pretty fancies, or, worse sail, to " nice feeling" m poetry, is to soften the very foundations of the intellect, to vitiate the air of solitude, to take the enervating influences of society into that region whence we draw the very fountains of life, and brace anew its relaxed springs. Next to the evil of a sentimental effeminate or intoxicating faith, is the evil of enjoying a hectic, relaxed, unvera. cious substitute for true poetry. A cultivated man is almost pro- fessionally sceptical about a new poet. U he believes iu him himself, he tries to speak of it as a weakness, and lurks behind a hesitating manner till he has satisfied himself that other men, whom lie regards as warier and stronger in this respect, are fascinated too.

It is evident that some such feeling has partially possessed the few poetic patrons of the young poet whose few sad, but delicately beau- tiful poems are now before us. Mr. Mouckton Milner, indeed,

i had in. great measure thrown off the doubts which haunted him before he wrote the interesting pages of introduction which he has prefixed. But David Gray's biographer is very much afraid, indeed, of being supposed entirely to believe in him, though the premature death of the poet gives him some hope of a favourable reception for his friend's verses. The same distrust has evidently, to some extent, chilled the incipient admiration of many others who had, and used, opportunities of serving him. And yet it would be difficult to fin any example of a genius which earlier gained the opportunity of a hearing, though, even so, that opportunity is posthumous, and the poet no longer able to hear the echo of his own words in the hearts and minds of others.

To us the apologetic manner with which David Gray's poems are introduced seems quite needless. We took them up in that mood, expectant of weariness, in which most people open the verses of un- known versifiers, and in indulging which most people are amply justified by the event. The account of the author, in some sense prepossess- ing as it was, yet confirmed the suspicion that his poetry would be turgid and sentimental, and led us to imagine that his early grave must have been the happiest and gentlest disenchantment of his very extravagant ambition which the love of Heaven could have granted him. That a man (even of 22) who could write sunh feverish letters as are here quoted, and talk confidently of a tomb iu Westmiuster Abbey, should have the true simplicity of all pure poetry in him, we found it impossible to anticipate. Self-control and tranquillity, which belong essentially to the higher intellec- tual poetry, he clearly needed. Yet that this little volume is full of the purest and simplest poetry of a very high—though, of course, not the most powerful—kind, we have no more doubt than we have of the clearness of the air on a mountain-top. The feverish haste of the poor young poet to be famous may have resulted from the shadow of death which was so fast creeping upon him, and which, long before he knew it, may have undermined that strength of patience and self- control which is usually a part of healthy self-confidence. At all events the touch of conceit, and the almost frantic thirst for fame which appears in the memoir, and now and then in the poetry, are excused, if not justified, by the rare beauty of that poetry, especially as coming from a man who could never have felt any of that tough- ness and tenacity which would have prevented him from imploring' a recognition that he knew he could compel.

David Gray was the eldest son of a handloom weaver of Merkland, on the banks of the Luggie, about eight miles from Glasgow. He was born on the 29th of January, 1838, received a good- classical education at the neighbouring parish school of Kirkintillocle and was intended by his parents, who were pleased by his success, for the Free Church of Scotland. Accordingly, at fourteen years of age, he was sent to the University of Glasgow, to go through the double toil of teaching for his livelihood and learning for his profession. In the beginning of 1860, when he was twenty-two years old, and the term of his service in the Free Normal Seminary of 'Glasgow had expired, lie openly revolted against both ministerial and didactic duties, to the

roved and respected. He could not, he said, compel himself

" To leave the sweet-air'd clover-purpled land of rhyme,"

• The Luggie and other Poems. By David Gray. With a Memoir by Junes Med- derwick ; ands Pbetanny Notice by E. M. Milne*, M.P. Macmillan.

in order "to batten on the bare theologies;" and in some beautiful verses in the poem called " The Luggie," he expresses his wonder at the voluntary choice of the ministerial profession by one of his uncles—born, he evidently thinks, for a better fate—whose learned ambitions, and early death from consumption, were a sad presage of his own lot. But neither father nor mother restrained though they dissuaded him. The former seems to have been a man of much force of character, of whom the son speaks as having

" that stern delight In naked truth and reason, which belongs To the intense reflective mind ;"

but who believed that every man must fashion for himself his own character and destiny,—a faith which Gray embodies, as his father's, in a fine sonnet. His mother was exceedingly fond of him and he of her, and that is all we learn and nearly all we care to learn. Many of the sonnets written in the very shadow of death speak of her. She sang the old Scotch airs to him during his last illness, and few of the sonnets are more beautiful than the one in which he thanks her for this. It is headed by a verse from an old Scotch ballad, which she was accustomed to sing to him : " Thou art wearin' awe', Jean, Like snaw when it's thaw, Jean ; Thou art wearin' awe,

To the land o' the leal!"—OLD SONG.

"O the impassable sorrow, mother mine!

Of the sweet, mournful air which, clear and well, For me thou singest! Never the divine Mahomedan harper, famous Israfel, Such rich enchanting luxury of woe Elicited from all his golden strings !

Therefore, dear singer sad ! chant clear, and low, And lovingly, the bard's imaginings.

0 poet unknown! conning thy verses o'er In lone, dim places, sorrowfully sweet ; And 0 musician! touching the quick core

Of pity, when thy skilful closes meet—

My tears confess your witchery as they flow, Since I, too, wear away like the unenduring snow."

But this is anticipating. When Gray left, in 1860, his schoolmaster's work and definitely refused to "batten on the bare theologies," he began applying to literary men for advice and assistance, present- ing them with poems which they had not a moment to read, alto- gether forgetful of the pre-occupation of most men's energies with other work than that of investigating the nature of an unknown youth's powers. He finished a poem of a thousand lines and sowed it broadcast among' busy human beings too much occupied in lite- rature themselves to be otherwise than sceptical of poetic preten- sions. "I sent to G. II. Lewes, to Professor Masson, to Professor Aytoun, to Disraeli, but no one will read it. They swear they have no time." At last he got Mr. Sydney Dobell to notice him, somewhat tutorially it is true, but still to read his verses, by a very quaint form of application in 1859, and received much kindness and some rather magnificent patronage from that gentleman, whom he never saw, but always spoke of with deep gratitude. In the spring of 1860 he wrote to Mr. Monckton Milnes, enclosing verses which Mr. Mikes read and praised,—strongly dissuading him, however, from a London or literary life. His answer to this letter was to come up to London and call on Mr. Milnes, much to that kind-hearted man's dismay. He stayed a short time, offered, under introduction from Mr. Mikes, a poem to a distinguished magazine, we suspect to the arskill, which was refused, caught cold on his chest, and went home in a consumption. At the end of the year his friends made an effort to procure change of climate for him ; he came south, first to Rich- mond and then to Torquay, where Mr. Monckton Milnes got him into a sanatorium from which he immediately fled back home, horri- fied at the prospect of living among "coughing, weak, nerveless patients." This was in January, 1861, and he lived till December in the same year, just seeing a specimen page of this his first volume of poems before he died. We have no portrait of him. Mr. Monckton Mikes describes him as "a light, well-built, but somewhat stooping figure, with a countenance that at once brought strongly to my recol- lection a cast of the face of Shelley in his youth, which I had seen at Mr. Leigh Hunt's. There was the same full brow, out-looking eyes, and sensitive melancholy mouth." The poems in this volume are "The Luggie," a poem of some length on the little stream by which lie lived, i a few miscella- neous pieces, and some sonnets, chiefly written n the immediate prospect of death. The latter contain the finest things in the volume,—contain, at all events, a most delicate reflection of his own immature mind, which, notwithstanding its impulses of appa- rent vanity, was one of singular beauty and refinement. For ex- ample : " Last night, on coughing slightly with sharp pain,

There came arterial blood, and with a sigh Of absolute grief I cried in bitter vein, That drop is my death-warrant : I must die.

Poor meagre life is mine, meagre and poor !

Rather a piece of childhood thrown away;

An adumbration faint; the overture To stifled music ! year that ends in May ; The sweet beginning of a tale unknown •

A dream unspoken; promise unfulfilled;

A morning with no noon a rose unblown- All its deep rich vermilion crushed and killed I' th' bud by frost:—Thus in false fear I cried, Forgetting that to abolish death Christ died."

The only doubt of any kind that can be cast on the nature of this poetry perhaps concerns its originality. To us it seems in this

respect not unlike, though superior to, Hartley Coleridge's poetry, deriving and reflecting much of its beauty from deeper and perhaps stronger minds. On some—and those the most unique of his poems —the stamp of Wordsworth's "lonely rapture" is very deeply .set, so deeply, that a thoughtful lover of Wordsworth's poetry might very well suppose that they were recovered poems of his earlier period. Such are the poems on " The Anemone," and on "The Cuckoo," praised by Mr. Monckton Milnes, and evidently composed under the immediate spell of Wordsworth's hardy and spiritual genius. There is the same clear, cool, bracing beauty about them, and the very same cast of thought. Neither of them are imitations, but both are poems composed under the fascination of the great ounkian's single-minded meditative passion. Neither of them would be un- worthy of the poet's own pen. The exquisite little poem, however, on the junction of the Luggie and the Bothlin, the two streams of David Gray's own birthplace, is quite his own, though his own in his Wordsworthian mood. It has, too, like all these poems, a delicate and continuous flow of beauty, which is not Wordsworthian, for the flow of harmonious feeling is seldom quite uninterrupted in the weatherbeaten prophet of the lakes and mountains. It would take up too much space to quote, but no one who reads it can doubt for a moment the inborn gemus and religious simplicity of the mind that produced it. This meeting of his favourite streams was evidently a vision that often haunted him; in other poems, as well as in the beautiful one to which we have alluded (pp. 102-101), it is woven into his thoughts; once, in the longer blank-verse poem, with nearly equal beauty :

" Hasten ye, and come And see the Luggie wind her liquid stream Thro' copsy villages and spiry towns ; And see the Bothlin trotting swill offoot From glades of alder, eager to combine Her dimpling harmony with Luggie's calm Clear music, like the music of the soul."

Yet we should not think the cast of his mind, on the whole, like Wordsworth's. It is impossible to judge of the directions of a mind withdrawn from us in extreme youth, but there is no trace in it of those

6, pangs

By which the generations are prepared,"

that gave the sublime under tone to the mind of the great Solitary. On the other hand, the "form and flush of the universal beauty" seems more constantly at his command. There is scarcely a line in the little volume that has not a liquid beauty of its own. He had no kind of joy in that naked sublimity of spiritual passion from which Wordsworth derived and recruited his great strength ; in one form or another he is always expressing the thought of one of his sonnets :

" Oh God, it is a terrible thing to die Into the inextinguishable life."

He did not love to "lift the painted veil which those who live call life." Yet the passion with which he threw himself into the indivickal beauties of Nature is never content with merely painting them. He seems to have an insatiable sense of the spiritual loveliness which, like a pure ether within the atmosphere, is to be drunk-in through the physical, but which lies within and distinct from it like an informing essence ; a feeling which finds, perhaps, its most perfect expression in the lines which we italicize in the following sonnet :

" Oh, beautiful moon! Oh, beautiful moon! again Thou persecutest me until I bend My brow, and soothe the aching of my brain.

I cannot see what handmaidens attend Thy silver passage as the heaven clears ; For, like a slender mist, a sweet vexation Works in my heart, till the impulsive tears Confess the bitter pain of adoration.

Oh, too, too beautiful moon! lift the white shell Of thy soft splendour through the shining air!

I own the magic power, the witching spell, And, blinded by thy beauty, call thee fair !

Alas! not often now thy silver horn Shall me delight with dreams and mystic love forlorn!"

This is poetry of no common order, and yet the book seems to

promise that had the poet lived he might have given us much of a higher order still. It is impossible to lay it down without a keener regret for ourselves than for him in his premature death. In reading it we have felt that •

" The sun went o'er us, and again Our foreheads felt the wind and rain ;"

nay, that had he lived, he might have done almost as much as any living poet—not, perhaps, to explain us to ourselves, but—to cool the fever, and lay the petty anxieties of this uneasy generation. As it is, he will give, in another sense, to all who read this little volume with any insight that for which in the last lingering winter of his life he expressed his infinite longing—the interval of

"One clear day, a snowdrop, and sweet air."