THE POET GRAY 
yet I love people that leave some traces of their journey be- 
hind them." And again in the same letter, "If I were to coin 
my whole mind into phrases, they would profit you nothing, 
nor fill a moderate page." Ten years later he wrote to Horace 
Walpole, who had urged him to compose more poetry, "Till 
four-score and ten, whenever the humour takes me, I will write, 
because I like it, and because I like myself better when I do so. 
If I do not write much, it is because I cannot." And to his friend 
Wharton he excused his unproductiveness, saying, "I by no 
means pretend to inspiration, but yet I affirm that the faculty 
in question is by no means voluntary. It is the result, I suppose, 
of a certain disposition of mind which does not depend on one^s 
self, and which I have not felt this long time." 
Thus, with no strong impulse or special motive for expres- 
sion, with no professional occupation and no liking for general 
society. Gray resorted to books and to the study of nature, and 
found in them employment which suited his temperament, af- 
forded to him the mild happiness which turned his occupations 
to pleasures, and soothed his conscience for allowing his rare 
genius to lie fallow. In a letter written in 1757 he says, "To be 
employed is to be happy;" but he adds, "This principle of mine 
(and I am convinced of its truth) has, as usual, no influence on 
my practice. I am alone and enmtye to the last degree, yet do 
nothing." The words are not to be taken literally. Few men, free 
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