 In the Victorian period , Alfred , Lord Tennyson adopted many features of the Elegy in his own extended meditation on death , In Memoriam . He established a ceremonial , almost religious , tone by reusing the idea of the " knell " that " tolls " to mark the coming night . This is followed with the poet narrator looking through letters of his deceased friend , echoing Gray 's narrator reading the tombstones to connect to the dead . Robert Browning relied on a similar setting to the Elegy in his pastoral poem " Love Among the Ruins " , which describes the desire for glory and how everything ends in death . Unlike Gray , Browning adds a female figure and argues that nothing but love matters . Thomas Hardy , who had memorised Gray 's poem , took the title of his fourth novel , Far from the Madding Crowd , from a line in it . In addition , many in his Wessex Poems and Other Verses ( 1898 ) contain a graveyard theme and take a similar stance to Gray , and its frontispiece depicts a graveyard . 
