Note 38 — POPE.
Reading edition
Wordsworth, who recognized forerunners in Thomson, Collins, Dyer, and Burns, and who chimes in with the popular superstition about Chatterton, is always somewhat niggardly in his appreciation of Gray. Yet he owed him not a little. Without Gray’s tune in his ears, his own noblest Ode would have missed the varied modulation which is one of its main charms. Where he forgets Gray, his verse sinks to something like the measure of a jig. Perhaps the suggestion of one of his own finest lines,
(“The light that never was on land or sea,”)
was due to Gray’s
“Orient hues unborrowed of the sun.”
I believe it has not been noticed that among the verses in Gray’s “Sonnet on the Death of West,” which Wordsworth condemns as of no value, the second—
“And reddening Phœbus lifts his golden fires”—
is one of Gray’s happy reminiscences from a poet in some respects greater than either of them:—
Jamque rubrum tremulis jubar ignibus erigere alte Cum cœptat natura. Lucret., iv. 404, 405.
Gray’s taste was a sensitive divining-rod of the sources whether of pleasing or profound emotion in poetry. Though he prized pomp, he did not undervalue simplicity of subject or treatment, if only the witch Imagination had cast her spell there. Wordsworth loved solitude in his appreciations as well as in his daily life, and was the readier to find merit in obscurity, because it gave him the pleasure of being a first discoverer all by himself. Thus he addresses a sonnet to John Dyer. But Gray was one of “the pure and powerful minds” who had discovered Dyer during his lifetime, when the discovery of poets is more difficult. In 1753 he writes to Walpole: “Mr. Dyer has more poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number, but rough and injudicious.” Dyer has one fine verse,—
“On the dark level of adversity.”