Excerpt from In the Shadows

He had arranged with his friend, Robert Buchanan, to leave Glasgow at a certain hour; but, unfortunately missing each other, they travelled by different trains. On arriving in London alone, the author of The Luggie wandered aimlessly about for hours. It was a raw, misty afternoon, and never perhaps did a more disconsolate figure pace the pave ments of the city of his dreams. Carrying a carpet-bag - filled with mss. - and with but a few shillings in his pocket, the homeless poet sauntered about in the mist and rain, till at last, footsore and weary, he turned into Hyde Park to Spend the night. One cannot tell the thoughts that passed through his mind as he strolled up and down the dismal Park from weary chime to chime but it 13 known that he contracted a violent cold which settled on his lungs, and brought about the consumption of which he died.

The two friends did not meet until upwards of a week after their arrival in London. There after they lived together in what Gray calls the dear, Old, ghastly, bankrupt garret. Days and nights were Spent in polishing the poems meant to conquer, literary London. But the labour was in vain. He knocked at the doors of many influential editors, but failed to gain admission.

In the meantime, his disease had made rapid progress. After a brief residence in the south of England without benefit, Gray returned to Kirkintilloch to die. I wish to die there, he wrote to his mother from Torquay; and so, in due time - the mere wreck of What he once was - he turned up at his father's house, never to leave it alive again. He lingered for some months, and the thirty sonnets here reprinted were written while he lay waiting for death.

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