tion of Thomson's Winter. It was the year in which Pope was imagining his goddess of Dulness, as she surveyed through fog her long succession of Grub Street children. From remote Scotland and from Southern Wales came a gift to English poetry which neither Grub Street nor Twickenham could bestow. While Pope,

a paladin in ruffles and periwig, was doing to death by exquisite rapier-thrusts the swarming hosts of Dulness, his own position was threatened unawares. That poetry of external nature which was to alienate for a season the general heart from such poetry as his, was already inaugurated by the youthful singers of Winter and of Grongar Hill.

Dyer had been for a time pupil to the painter Richardson, and master and pupil may have laid down their brushes now and again to con over some passage of Milton, whom they both knew well and honoured. In Dyer's love of landscape there is something of the painter's feeling; he loves a wide prospect, diversified by stream and wood, backed by blue aërial steeps 'solemnly vast'; the effect is heightened if the landscape include the ragged walls of some crumbling castle, or some peasant's smoky nest leaning against its gnarled tree. There remains but to add a human figure or two-an old man white-bearded, in weed ragged and brown, leaning on his spade in the little garden, or a fisher in the willow

shade,

'Who with the angle in his hand
Swings the nibbling fry to land.'

The poetry of ruins was not reserved for the romantic second half of the century. It is Dyer who describes

The spacious plain

Of Sarum, spread like ocean's boundless round,
Where solitary Stonehenge grey with moss,

Ruin of ages, nods.'

And Johnson could not withhold his admiration from some lines conceived among Rome's 'dilapidating edifices.'

"The Pilgrim oft

At dead of night, mid his oraison hears
Aghast the voice of time, disparting towers,
Tumbling all precipitate down dash'd,

Rattling around loud thundering to the moon.'

But Dyer, as even these lines show, is not a painter who would constrain words to be the medium of his art; he is a poet. He has a heart that listens, an eye that loves; his landscape is full of living change, of tender incident, of the melody of breeze and bird and stream. Here under glossy-rinded beeches 'the burrowing rabbit turns the dust'; here the new-dropped lamb,

'Tottering with weakness by his mother's side

Feels the fresh world about him';

here the husbandman returning at eve to his 'little smiling cottage warm embowered,' meets his rosy children at the door,

'Prattling their welcomes, and his honest wife,

With good brown cake and bacon slice, intent
To cheer his hunger after labour hard.'

Dyer loves solitary musing on some gentle hillside, and sometimes moralises amiably on the gains of a private life remote from men ;

'Grass and flowers Quiet treads.'

But it is one of his distinctions that he never really opposed nature and human society, as poets of Rousseau's part of the century were wont to oppose them; and he not only pays homage to trade in the way of easy platitudes, but really receives thrills of poetic excitement from the life of man in commerce, its force, its vividness, its picturesqueness, its variety. "Tis art and toil,' he exclaims, 'give nature value.' Could he choose his lot it would be on some healthful waste, 'far from a Lord's loath'd neighbourhood'; yet he would not be neighbourless, for he loves his toiling fellow-men, and if the soil were coarse and sterile, it should be so only 'till forced to flourish and subdued by me.'

The farmer still collecting his scattered sheaves under the fullorbed harvest moon, the strong-armed rustic plunging in the flood an unshorn ewe, the carter on the dusty road beside his nodding wain, the maiden at her humming wheel, delight Dyer's imagination no more than do the Sheffield smiths near the glaring mass 'clattering their heavy hammers down by turns,' the builder, trowel in hand, at whose spell Manchester rises and spreads like Carthage before the eyes of Æneas, the keen-eyed factor inspecting his bales, the bending porter on the wharf where masts crowd thick. The poet's ancestors, as he is pleased to record in verse, were

weavers, who, flying from the rage of superstition, brought the loom to

'that soft tract

Of Cambria, deep-embayed, Dimetian land,

By green hills fenced, by ocean's murmur lull'd.'

From them he obtained a goodly heritage-his love of freedom and his love of industry. He honoured traffic, the 'friend to wedded love'; he honoured England for her independence and her mighty toil; America, for her vast possibilities of well-being. He pleaded against the horrors of the slave trade. He courted the favour of no lord. And, in an age of city poets, he found his inspiration on the hillside and by the stream.

EDWARD DOWDEN.

VOL. IIL

GRONGAR HILL.

Silent Nymph, with curious eye!
Who, the purple evening, lie
On the mountain's lonely van,
Beyond the noise of busy man,
Painting fair the form of things,
While the yellow linnet sings;
Or the tuneful nightingale

Charms the forest with her tale;
Come with all thy various hues,
Come, and aid thy sister Muse;
Now while Phoebus riding high
Gives lustre to the land and sky!
Grongar Hill invites my song,

Draw the landskip bright and strong;
Grongar, in whose mossy cells
Sweetly musing Quiet dwells ;
Grongar, in whose silent shade,
For the modest Muses made,
So oft I have, the evening still,
At the fountain of a rill,

Sate upon a flowery bed,

With my hand beneath my head;

While strayed my eyes o'er Towy's flood,

Over mead, and over wood,

From house to house, from hill to hill, 'Till Contemplation had her fill.

About his chequered sides I wind, And leave his brooks and meads behind, And groves, and grottoes where I lay, And vistoes shooting beams of day: Wide and wider spreads the vale;

As circles on a smooth canal:

The mountains round, unhappy fate!
Sooner or later, of all height,

Withdraw their summits from the skies,
And lessen as the others rise:

Still the prospect wider spreads,
Adds a thousand woods and meads,

Still it widens, widens still,
And sinks the newly-risen hill.

Now, I gain the mountain's brow,
What a landskip lies below!
No clouds, no vapours intervene,
But the gay, the open scene
Does the face of nature show,
In all the hues of heaven's bow!
And, swelling to embrace the light,
Spreads around beneath the sight.
Old castles on the cliffs arise,
Proudly towering in the skies;
Rushing from the woods, the spires
Seem from hence ascending fires;
Half his beams Apollo sheds
On the yellow mountain-heads,
Gilds the fleeces of the flocks,
And glitters on the broken rocks.
Below me trees unnumbered rise,
Beautiful in various dyes :

The gloomy pine, the poplar blue,
The yellow beech, the sable yew,
The slender fir, that taper grows,

The sturdy oak with broad-spread boughs;
And beyond the purple grove,

Haunt of Phillis, queen of love,

Gaudy as the opening dawn,

Lies a long and level lawn

On which a dark hill, steep and high,
Holds and charms the wandering eye.
Deep are his feet in Towy's flood,
His sides are cloth'd with waving wood,