I had enjoyed the pleasure of
seeing, in different moods of mind, your Coleorton landscape from my
fireside, it _suggested_ to me the following sonnet, which--having
walked out to the side of Grasmere brook, where it murmurs through the
meadows near the Church--I composed immediately--

Praised be the Art....

"The images of the smoke and the travellers are taken from your picture;
the rest were added, in order to place the thought in a clear point of
view, and for the sake of variety."--ED.

VARIANTS:

[1] C. and 1838.

... which ... 1815.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Compare, in Pope's _Moral Essays_, ii. 19--

Choose a firm cloud before it fall, and in it
Catch, ere she change, the Cynthia of this minute. ED.

[B] Compare, in the _Elegiac Stanzas, suggested by a Picture of Peele
Castle, in a Storm_ (vol. iii. p. 55)--

Elysian quiet, without toil or strife. ED.

TO THE POET, JOHN DYER

Composed 1811.--Published 1815

Classed among the "Miscellaneous Sonnets." In the edition of 1815 the
title was, _To the Poet, Dyer_.--ED.

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 Cambria, deep embayed, 5
With green hills fenced, with[1] ocean's murmur lull'd;[A]
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, 10
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!

John Dyer, author of _Grongar Hill_ (1726), and _The Fleece_ (1757), was
born at Aberglasney, in Caermarthenshire, in 1698, and died in 1758.
Both Akenside and Gray, before Wordsworth's time, had signalised his
merit, in opposition to the dicta of Johnson and Horace Walpole. The
passage which Wordsworth quotes is from _The Fleece_, in which Dyer is
referring to his own ancestors, who were weavers, and "fugitives from
superstition's rage," and who brought the art of weaving "from Devon" to

that soft tract
Of Cambr