This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
The original letter is unlocated, a copy, transcription, or published version survives
Gregorian
This letter is part of the Primary Texts section of the Thomas Gray Archive.
XML created for the Thomas Gray Archive.
This letter is part of the correspondence calendar of the complete correspondence of Thomas Gray. The calendar contains detailed bibliographic records for all known original, copied, or published letters written by or to the poet as well as the full-text, where available. Each record is accompanied by digitised images of the manuscript, where available, or digitised images of the first printed edition.
[...]
Every language has its idiom, not only of words and phrases, but of customs and manners, which cannot be represented in the tongue of another nation, especially of a nation so distant in time and place, without constraint and difficulty; of this sort, in the present instance, are the curfew bell, the Gothic Church, with its monuments, organs and anthems, the texts of Scripture, &c. There are certain images, which, though drawn from common nature, and every where obvious, yet strike us as foreign to the turn and genius of Latin verse; the beetle that flies in the evening, to a Roman, I guess, would have appeared too mean an object for poetry; 'that leaves the world to darkness and to me', is good English, but has not the turn of a Latin phrase, and therefore, I believe, you were in the right to drop it.
[...]
Might not the English characters here be romanized? Virgil is just as good as Milton, and Cæsar as Cromwell, but who shall be Hampden?