BARD of THE FLEECE, whose skilful genius made
That work a living landscape fair and bright;
Nor hallowed less with musical delight

Than those soft scenes through which thy childhood strayed,
Those southern tracts of sunshine' deep embayed

With green hills fenced, with ocean's murmur lulled ;'
Though hasty Fame hath many a chaplet culled
For worthless brows, while in the pensive shade
Of cold neglect she leaves thy head ungraced;

Yet pure and powerful minds, hearts meek and still,
A grateful few, shall love thy modest lay,
Long as the shepherd's bleating flocks shall stray
O'er naked Snowdon's wide aerial waste;
Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill."

Gray, somewhere in his letters, places Dyer at the head of the poets of his day; and though the list enumerated contains no name above mediocrity, declares him to be a man of genius. Akenside, who Dr Johnson allows, "on a poetical question, had a right to be heard," said, "that he would regulate his opinion of the reigning taste by the fate of Dyer's Fleece; for if that were ill-received, he should not think it any longer reasonable to expect fame from excellence." The pleasant sonnet you have now read expresses the sentiments of Wordsworth.

"In 1757," quoth Dr Johnson, "Dyer published The Fleece, his chief poetical work; of which I will not suppress a ludicrous story. Dodsley,

VOL. XLV. NO, CCLXXXIII,

the bookseller, was one day mentioning it to a critical visitor, with more expectation of success than the other could easily admit. In the conversation the author's age was asked; and being reported as advanced in life, 'He will,' said the critic, 'be buried in woollen.'" "This witticism," saith Thomas Campbell, "has probably been oftener repeated than any passage in the poem." Many a wretched witticism has had wide currency-and this is the most wretched of the wretched-the little meaning it had at the time having been, somehow or other, we believe, dependent on the repeal of a tax affecting graveclothes. The "critical visitor," like most of his tribe-must have been an ignorant fellow-for Grongar Hill had

20

been popular for thirty and The Ruins of Rome well known for twenty years.

"Of The Fleece," saith Samuel, "which never became popular, and is now universally neglected, I can say little that is likely to recall it to attention. The woolcomber and the poet appear to me such discordant natures, that an attempt to bring them together, is to couple the serpent with the fowl. When Dyer, whose mind was not unpoetical, has done his utmost, by interesting his reader in our native commodity, by interposing rural imagery, and incidental digressions, by clothing small images in great words, and by all the writer's art of delusion, the meanness naturally adhering, and the irreverence habitually annexed to trade and manufacture, sink him un der insuperable oppression; and the disgust which blank verse, incumbering and incumbered, superadds to an unpleasing subject, soon repels the reader, however willing to be pleased."

True that the poem has fallen into oblivion, and, we fear, by its own weight, for it is heavy, and frequently liable to some of the objections here urged; but it is worthy of revival. As to the miserable stuff about "the meanness naturally adhering, and the irreverence habitually annexed to trade and manufacture," it would be shameful even to seek to refute it. A powerful and original genius has done that by blows on an anvil, heard far up Parnassus-aye, Ebenezer Elliot has illuminated the town of Sheffield with a light that will outlive the blazing of all her forges.

More pleasing seems than all the past has
been,

And every form that fancy can repair,
From dark oblivion glows divinely there."

Let poets be just to one another; but alas! we fear it is among the greatest that jealousy or some unanalysable feeling towards their living compeers has ever prevailed.

Yes we shall recite a bit of Grongar:

Now I gain the mountain's brow,
What a landscape lies below!
No clouds, no vapours intervene ;
But the gay, the open scene,

Grongar Hill is a very pleasing effusion, and we have half a mind to recite some remembered passagesthough you might, perhaps, be tempted Does the face of nature show, to cry "pshaw!" We once heard a poet say that the opening of the Pleasures of Hope was borrowed-we fear he said stolen from it. That is not true-begging his pardon. Dyer

writes:

"See on the mountain's northern side,
Where the prospect opens wide,
Where the evening gilds the tide ;
How close and small the hedges lie!
What streaks of meadow cross the eye!
A step, methinks, may pass the stream,
So little distant dangers seem.
So we mistake the future's face
Eyed through Hope's delusive glass;
As yon summits, soft and fair,
Clad in colours of the air,

In all the lines 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!
Busking 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 in the broken rocks!
"Below the trees unnumber'd 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 Phyllis, 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 clothed with waving wood,
And ancient towers crown his brow,
That cast an awful look below;
Whose ragged walls the ivy creeps,
And with her arms from falling keeps:
So both a safety from the wind,
In mutual dependence find.

'Tis now the raven's bleak abode ;
'Tis now th' apartment of the toad;
And there the fox securely feeds;
And there the poisonous adder breeds,
Conceal'd in ruins, moss, and weeds;
While ever and anon, there falls
Huge heaps of hoary moulder'd walls.
Yet time has seen, that lifts the low,
And level lays the lofty brow,
Has seen this broken pile complete,
Big with the vanity of state;
But transient is the smile of fate!
A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam in a winter's day,
Is all the proud and mighty have
Between the cradle and the grave."

The Country Walk is almost Grongar Hill over again, with variations--but it has some pictures more touching to the heart. It opens gladsomely

"I am resolved this charming day,
In the open field to stray;

And have no roof above my head,
But that whereon the gods do tread."

These lines are followed somewhat
unexpectedly by

"Before the yellow barn I see
A beautiful variety,

Of strutting cocks, advancing stout,
And flirting empty chaff about;

Hens, ducks, and geese, and all their
brood,

And turkeys gabbling for their food,
While rustics thresh the wealthy floor,
And tempt them all to crowd the door."
As he saunters through the fields,

"Here finding pleasure after pain,
Sleeping I see a wearied swain,
While his full scrip lies open by
That does his healthy food supply."
We wonder what has wearied the
swain-the hour appears to be ante-
meridian-and were we to find any
swain on our farm asleep, with a full
scrip lying open by, we should infal-
libly fling it over the hedge, and rouse
him from his dream of " Dorothy

Draggle-Tail," with an antidote to the rod of Morpheus.

By and by the poet seeks the shade, and seems disposed to imitate the swain:

"A little onward and I go

Into the shade that groves bestow;
And on green moss I lay me down,
That o'er the root of oak has grown.
There all is silent, but some flood
That sweetly murmurs in the wood;
And birds that warble in the sprays,
And charm even silence with their lays."
We are easily pleased-but we call
that pretty poetry and so does
Wordsworth. John Dyer does not
fall asleep--but, on the contrary, ad-
dresses silence with much animation.
"Oh powerful silence! how you reign
In the poet's busy brain!

-

His numerous thoughts obey the calls
Of the tuneful waterfalls;

Like moles, whene'er the coast is clear,
They rise before thee without fear,
And range in parties here and there."
We have such love for moles that no
man can mention them amiss, and the
image is good; but we are sorry to
find that we are not so well acquainted
with their habits as we had fondly
imagined; for never has it been our
good fortune to meet with parties of
moles ranging here and there, not
even on the hills or holms of Yarrow,
where the dear, sweet, soft, sleek civil
engineers have, from time immemorial,
loved to pitch their pastoral tents, dis-
tinguishable but by finest eyes from
those of the fairies.

We love thee, "excellent and ami-
able Dyer"-
-as thou art rightly called
in a note to The Excursion-for this
picture :-

"I rouse me up, and on I rove,
'Tis more than time to leave the grove,
The sun descends, the evening breeze
Begins to whisper through the trees:
And as I leave the sylvan gloom,
As to the glare of day I come,
An old man's smoky nest I see,
Leaning on an aged tree;

Whose willow walls and furzy brow,

A little garden sways below.

Through spreading beds of blooming green,
Matted with herbage sweet and clean,
A vein of water limps along,

And makes them ever green and young.
Here he puffs upon his spade,
And digs up cabbage in the shade ;
His tattered rags are sable brown,
His beard and hair are hoary grown;
The dying sap descends apace,
And leaves a withered hand and face."

The Ruins of Rome! "Enough of Grongar and the shady dales of winding Towy," exclaims the bard, ambitious of a higher flight. And can he soar? Why, if not like on eagle, yet like one of the long-wings. He sweeps, not unmajestically, round the Seven Hills.

Fallen, fallen, a silent heap; her heroes all

Sunk in their urns: behold the pride of

pomp,

The throne of nations fallen; obscured in
dust,

Even yet majestical; the solemn scene
Elates the soul, while now the rising sun
Flames on the ruins in the purer air
Towering aloft, upon the glittering plain,
Like broken rocks, a vast circumference;
Rent palaces, crushed columns, rifled
moles,

tery of the principle of contrast is done away. But, secondly, there will still remain to be ascertained the cause of the power of contrast. For those links, though they make the transition possible, do not make it necessary. The power of Contrast, that which impels the mind to the transition, is a power of feeling: and the law by which it acts, is a law of feeling altogether. When we look upon the ruins of Rome, the mere fact that this site, and these broken walls and reft pillars, are part of the city vainly called eternal, would not necessarily drive back our imagination with vehemence to the conception of the fallen greatness. But our mind came to the spot full of a thousand mighty recollections of that ancient majesty: We brought to the place where Rome

Fanes roll'd on fanes, and tombs on buried stood, the memory of Rome. tombs."

Association of Ideas-by CONTRAST!! How is this? A poet looks round on the circuit of that ground, within which the Queen of the Earth once drew the nations together to gaze upon her majesty, and his spirit flies back afar into the past, to remember that which has disappeared. It is the CONTRAST that determines the course of his thoughts. It is the humiliation and the dust of that which was the diadem of the earth, that brings to mind the sovereignty which is no more. Yet, in this instance, as in every other mark ye-it is no utter reversal of thought that takes place in the mind-no total and utter substitution of that which before was in it in no degree, for that which fills it; but in all, the mind treads the course she has known. That which now is seen, has links with that which is conceived; and it is by those links already fixed, that the mind passes from the object of present sense to the object of conception. It is this link of thought, which, if nothing were left of Rome but the earth on which she stood, would suffice to bring again the vanished city before our wide imagination.

In respect of all analysis of the instances of association by CONTRAST, two things are to be had in view. In the first place, there will be found in all of them, as there is reason to think, established links of connexion in the thought, enabling the mind to pass from one object to the other and by these the apparent mys

:

There

fore it was, that when we saw the
place, and the yet surviving relics, we
missed that which should have been
there. It was our exulting and tri-
umphant sympathy with that imperial
state that made us feel disappointed
when we came to look
the spot,
upon
as if Cicero or Scipio could have been
there, to see what was not of Rome.
It was this high and lofty feeling
quickened by the yet surviving relics
of majesty, that was wounded by the
sight of decay, dishonour, and desola-

tion.

And we need seek no other law to account for our grief, than that which would fill with sorrow and dismay the heart of a holy priest, who, entering the temple of his God, should find the altar sullied with profanation.

"Temples and towers, whose giant forms
unfold

The massive grandeur of the world of old!
Say, shall the pilgrim glance his heedless

eye,

O'er your huge wreck, and silently pass
by?

Nor 'mid the waste of ages pause to scan
The mighty relics of forgotten man?

No, for those walls, that crown the brow

of time,

Shall wake to musings mournfully sublime; And antique sculptures crumbling 'mid the pile,

Delay his steps to linger for a while.

"In Egypt's dreary land, where dark

ness spread,

Mysterious gloom, around Religion's head;

The land was sad beneath her awful wings, And woful was her voice as Memnon's mystic strings!

But Silence now and Desolation reign;
O'er her fall'n altar and her desert fane,
Unseen she sits-no charmed voice she
hears,

But columns falling in the waste of years!
And the gaunt chacal from his charnel-
home

Howl to the blast that shakes the trembling dome!

-Yet 'mid those temples desolate and wild,

Though the keen raven from the stormy north,

Thy eagle crush'd, in wrath careering forth;

And he the fierce-eyed Hun- the scourge
of God!

Broke with his sinewy arm thine iron rod,
That, o'er the nations held with giant sway,
Had swept their honours and their kings
away.-

"Still dome on dome the stranger eye beguiles,

Where Solitude reigns round with Fear her child, The pale priest raised his voice when Towers, battlements, a wilderness of piles. bursting day And still the capitol its crested form

Shot tremblingly, from heaven, his earliest Sublimely rears—a giant in the storm— ray; The look is steadfast, for the mental eye

His earliest ray, that on the Harp-strings Sees the firm band that made ambition die ; Sees Cæsar fall, and, where the tyrant

shone,

And roused to life their vibratory tone! Hark! the rapt strain, the choral virgins raise,

stood,

The sword of Brutus crimson'd with his blood!

While sounds mysterious hymn their Mem- Still 'mid the forum Cicero seems to roll The flood of eloquence that whelms the

non's praise,

soul,

While veterans round lean silent on the sword

The lords of earth can tremble at a word!

"What tho' thro' every breach that

time has made,

The blast moans hollow, and the collonade
Scarce shelters ev'n the weeds that flourish

in its shade!

What tho' the wolf has howl'd, the tempest roar'd,

In halls and courts where gods have been adored!

Yet memory's touch each faded pile

renews;

Again they bloom in renovated hues,
And Poggio traces 'mid the mass of dust,
The temple, portico, and trophied bust.
How fallen! how changed! the world's

delight and shame,

The vine luxuriates in the path of fame!
The bat flies fitful thro' her god's abode,
And reptiles nestle where the hero trode !
Drear are her tow'rs that shone amid the

skies!

And prone on earth the mighty giant lies.'”

JOHN FINLAY's, who, many years ago, That poetry is not Dyer's-it is died in youth.

Dyer ascends the Palatine Hill, and shows himself a poet.

"Now the brow
We gain enraptured; beauteously distinct
The numerous porticos and domes upswell,
With obelisks and columns interposed,
And pine, and fir, and oak; so fair a scene
Sees not the dervise from the spiral tomb
Of ancient Chammos, while his eye beholds
Proud Memphis' reliques o'er th' Egyp-
tian plain :