go,
Where thousand flaming flowers glow,
And every neighbouring hedge I greet
With honey-suckles smelling sweet;
Now o'er the daisy meads I stray
And meet with, as I pace my way,
Sweetly shining on the eye
A rivulet gliding smoothly by,
Which shows with what an easy tide
The moments of the happy glide.'

_An Epistle to a Friend in Town_, records his satisfaction with the
country retirement in which his days are passed. In a rather awkward
stanza he says that he is more than content, and is indeed charmed with
everything, and the lines close with the moralizing that was dear to
Dyer's heart:

'Alas! what a folly that wealth and domain
We heap up in sin and in sorrow!
Immense is the toil, yet the labour how vain!
Is not life to be over to-morrow?
Then glide on my moments, the few that I have,
Smooth-shaded and quiet and even;
While gently the body descends to the grave,
And the spirit arises to heaven.'

Dyer was an artist as well as a poet, and visited Italy, which suggested
a poem in blank verse, _The Ruins of Rome_ (1740). After his return to
England he entered into holy orders, took a wife, who is said to have
been a descendant of Shakespeare, and settled at Calthorp in
Leicestershire, which he afterwards exchanged for a living in
Lincolnshire. There is much to like in Dyer, and he has had the good
fortune to win the applause of two great poets. Gray says, in a letter
to Horace Walpole, that he had 'more of poetry in his imagination than
almost any of our number,' and Wordsworth in a sonnet, _To the Poet,
John Dyer_, writes:

'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 flock shall stray
O'er naked Snowdon's wide aerial waste;
Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill!'

[Sidenote: William Shenstone (1714-1764).]

'The true rustic style,' Charles Lamb writes, 'I think is to be found in
Shenstone,' and he calls his _Schoolmistress_ the 'prettiest of poems.'

William Shenstone was born in 1714 at the Leasowes in Hales-Owen, a spot
upon which he afterwards expended his skill as a landscape gardener. In
1732 he went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, and remained there for some
ye