THE POET GRAY 
AS A NATURALIST 
"The unique distinction may be claimed for Gray,'' says Mr. 
Lowell in his delightful essay on the poet, "that he is the 
English poet who has written less and pleased more than any 
other." The slenderness of his poetic product, and several ex- 
pressions in his letters concerning his indolence and his ennui 
from want of occupation have tended to create an impression of 
him as an intellectual idler and voluptuary whose idea of "para- 
disaical pleasures" was to read eternal new romances of Mari- 
vaux and Crebillon, and whose sovereign anodyne was Fasti- 
dium. There could hardly be a more mistaken impression. It is 
true that he wrote no poetry of consequence after he was forty 
years old. The stream of his inspiration, which up to that time 
had been intermittent, but had occasionally gathered head 
enough to set in motion the wheel of expression, after this 
period ceased to flow in the channels of poetry. 
He regretted, his own sluggishness and indisposition to write; 
but the effort to overcome it was beyond his power. In 1758, 
when he was forty- two years old, he wrote to his friend Mason, 
"I cannot brag of my spirits, my situation, my employments, or 
my fertility; the days and the nights pass, and I am never 
nearer to anything but that one to which we are all tending; 
(5) 
