Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3THE SCENE OF GRAY’S ELEGY textit{The Country Church-Yard? Tomb of Gray ? Stoke-Pogis Church ? textit{Reverie and Reminiscence ? Scenes of Milton ? Waller ? Porter ? Coke ? Denham. visit to the country church-yard where the ashes of Gray repose amid the scenes his muse immortalized is the culmination and the fitting end of a literary pilgrimage westward from London to Windsor and the nearer shrines of Thames-vale. Our way has led us to the sometime homes of Pope, Fielding, Shelley, Garrick, Burke, Richardson; to the birthplaces of Waller and Gibbon, the graves of Junius, Hogarth, Thomson, and Penn; to the cottage where Jane Porter wrote her wondrous tales, and the ivy- grown church where Tennyson was married. Nearer the scene of the
Elegy we visit other shrines: the Horton where Milton wrote his earlier works,
Masque of Comus,
Lycidas,
Arcades; the Hallbarn where Waller composed the panegyric to Cromwell, the
Congratulation, and other once famous poems; the mansion where the Herschels studied and wrote. We have had the gray spire of Stoke-Pogis Church in view during this last day of our ramble. From the summit of the
Cooper’s Hill of Denham’s best-known poem, from the battlements of Windsor and the windows of Eton, from the elm-shaded meads that border the Thames and the fields redolent of lime-trees and new-mown hay where we loitered, we have had tempting glimpses of that
ivy-mantled tower that made us wish the winged hours more swift; for we have purposely deferred our visit to that sacred spot so that the even-tide and the hour the curfew tolled
the knell of parting day across this peaceful landscape may find us amid the old graves where
the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep. As we approach through verdant lanes bordered by fields where the ploughman is yet at h…
