What can be inferred about the speaker's life and values from the way he imagines himself described in lines 98-108?

In Gray's famous "Elegy", the speaker is a dreamer, a man who wishes to live as the rustic souls buried in the churchyard did, "far from the madding crowd." Most of the poem is concerned with establishing that the humble, seemingly unimportant people buried here had at least as much value in life as those who achieved glory and fame in the world. Gray says that "Their lot forbade, nor circumscribed alone/Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined." This implies that a poor farmer or laborer is a greater human being, in his way, than a monarch or politician who would "wade through slaughter to a throne,/And shut the gates of mercy on mankind."
Gray's poem is a subdued expression of Enlightenment philosophy and the growing ideal of the equality of all people. Alexander Pope had put forward the same thought, though extended beyond humanity to all of creation, in his Essay on Man, in the lines "Who sees with equal eye as God of all,/A hero perish or a sparrow fall,/Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,/And now a bubble burst. and now a world." Gray, however, goes further, in celebrating the special qualities of the poor and dispossessed which place them above the fray.
Though it's dangerous to read biography into poetry, Gray's sympathy for the nameless ones buried in the churchyard was possibly due to his having seen himself as an outsider throughout his life. He probably was gay, and early in his life was devastated by the death of his friend Richard West. The "Elegy" is a masterpiece that represents a major step in the foreshadowing of the Romantic period.