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...