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He had the tenderest friendship for the young Prince, and mourned his death in the best elegy that appeared at the dawn of modern literature. Of the ancient fortress of Bertrand de Born, Viscount of Hautefort, a few vestiges are left, which may be easily distinguished from the later masonry of the castle with which they are combined.
And in Salamis they had permitted them to bury the dead near the city, as being men who had behaved themselves gallantly, and to write over them this elegy: Well-watered Corinth, stranger, was our home; Salamis, Ajax's isle, is now our grave; Here Medes and Persians and Phoenician ships We fought and routed, sacred Greece to save.
It is, therefore, interesting to collect the passages in which he speaks of an elegy only equalled in our language by "Lycidas", and in the point of passionate eloquence even superior to Milton's youthful lament for his friend. "The 'Adonais', in spite of its mysticism," he writes to Ollier, "is the least imperfect of my compositions."
Even that literature is most prized and most enduring which is artistic, like the odes of Horace, the epics of Virgil, the condensed narrative of Tacitus; like the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," or the "Deserted Village," or "Corinne," or "Waverley." Varro was the most learned writer whom Rome produced, and the most voluminous. Yet scarcely any thing remains of his productions.
"Dear as the mother to the son More than my brothers are to me." In Memoriam is a group of poems rather than one long poem "Short swallow-flights of song, that dip Their wings in tears, and skim away." It is written in a meter which Tennyson believed he had invented, but which Ben Jonson and others had used before him. Two hundred years before Jonson had written a little elegy beginning
I fancy I touched it with a dead man's finger-nails." She crossed her wrists tight at the clasp of her waist, and letting her chin fall on her throat, shook her body fretfully, much as a pettish little girl might do. Wilfrid grimaced. "Tick-tick" was not a pathetic elegy in his ears. "The only thing is, not to think about it," said he. "It's only an instrument, after all."
Then a frenzied contest began; but the combatants were soon separated; the actors and their antagonists fell on each other's necks, and a Homeric poet, who had compiled an elegy for the evening on the "Gods coerced by the hosts of the new superstition," made up simply of lines culled from the Iliad and Odyssey, seized this favorable opportunity.
They are parted, she, woman-like, dies, and he, man-like, sings an elegy. Even more to Immanuel's credit is his praise of his own wife. She has every womanly grace of body and soul. If this be the true man revealed, then his light verses of love addressed to other women must be, as I have hinted, a mere pose.
Even so do you, dear Alianora, who are not divine, look toward me, quite unmoved by anything except incurious wonder, the while that I cry my elegy. "I, for love, and for the glamour of bright beguiling dreams that hover and delude and allure all lovers, could never until to-day behold clearly what person I was pestering with my notions.
The stars were visible, but the night was moonless and sufficiently dark. The general was in one of the foremost boats; and near him was a young midshipman, John Robison, afterwards professor of natural philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. He used to tell in his later life how Wolfe, with a low voice, repeated Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard to the officers about him.
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