Two hundred and forty-years ago next Tuesday, Thomas Gray was buried in his mother’s grave in Stoke Poges churchyard. In his ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’ (published 1747), he had written of gales (presumably lesser ones, scarcely registering 8 on the Beaufort scale) that seemed ‘redolent of joy and youth’ and able ‘to breathe a second spring’.
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