was it that the feminine note, the domestic or personal note, the compassionate note or note of pity, the purely sentimental note, was first heard in English poetry as a note asserting equality with the masculine note, and tending to assert itself as the dominant note?

One of the most beautiful and best-known poems in the English language is Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard; and in the following stanzas which many of you will recognise as belonging to it, do we not seem to overhear something like the note of which we are in search?—

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree’s shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap, Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep. [Pg 37] The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn, The swallow twitt’ring from the straw-built shed, The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed. For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her ev’ning care: No children run to lisp their sire’s return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

[Pg 37]

Here our sympathy is asked, not for kings and princesses, not for great lords and fine ladies, not for the rise and fall of empires, but for the rude forefathers of the hamlet, for the busy housewife, for the hard-working peasant and his children, for homely joys and the annals of the poor. But Gray does not maintain this note beyond the five stanzas I have just quoted. He quickly again lapses into the traditional, the classic, the purely masculine note:

The boast of Heraldry, the pomp of Pow’r, And all that Beauty, all that Wealth e’er gave, Await alike th’ inevitable hour, The paths of glory lead but to the grave. Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault, If Mem’ry o’er their tombs no trophies raise, Where through the long-drawn aisle, and fretted vault, The pealing anthem swells the note of praise. Can storied urn, or animated bust, Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust, Or Flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

The stanzas that follow are splendid stanzas, but they are the stately and sonorous verse of a detached and moralising mind, not the pathetic verse of a sympathising heart. We have to wait another twenty years before we come upon a poem of consequence in which the feminine note is not only present, but paramount.[Pg 38] In the year 1770, nearly a century and a half ago, appeared Goldsmith’s 

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