year before
Collins' and Joseph Warton's-and a second in 1760. They are of little
value, but show here and there traces of Milton's minor poetry and that
elegiac sentiment, common to the lyrical verse of the time, noticeable
particularly in a passage on the nightingale in Ode XV, book i;, "To the
Evening Star." "The Pleasures of Imagination" was the parent of a
numerous offspring of similarly entitled pieces, among which are Joseph
Warton's "Pleasures of Melancholy," Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope," and
Rogers' "Pleasures of Memory."

In the same year with Thomson's "Winter" (1726) there were published in
two poetical miscellanies a pair of little descriptive pieces, "Grongar
Hill" and "The Country Walk," written by John Dyer, a young Welshman, in
the octosyllabic couplet of Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Pensoroso."
("Grongar Hill," as first printed was a sort of irregular ode with
alternate rhyming; but it was much improvised in later editions, and
rewritten throughout in couplets.)

Dyer was a landscape painter who had been educated at Westminster school,
studied under Richardson at London, and spent some time wandering about
the mountains of Wales in the practice of his art. "Grongar Hill" is, in
fact, a pictorial poem, a sketch of the landscape seen from the top of
his favorite summit in South Wales. It is a slight piece of work,
careless and even slovenly in execution, but with an ease and lightness
of touch that contrast pleasantly with Thomson's and Akenside's
ponderosity. When Dyer wrote blank verse he slipped into the Thomsonian
diction, "cumbent sheep" and "purple groves pomaceous." But in "Grongar
Hill"--although he does call the sun Phoebus--the shorter measure seems
to bring shorter words, and he has lines of Wordsworthian simplicity--

"The woody valleys warm and low,
The windy summit, wild and high."

or the closing passage, which Wordsworth alludes to in his sonnet on
Dyer--"Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill":

"Grass and flowers Quiet treads
On the meads and mountain heads. . .
And often, by the murmuring rill,
Hears the thrush while all is still,
Within the groves of Grongar Hill."

Wordsworth was attracted by Dyer's love of "mountain turf" and "spacious
airy downs" and "naked Snowdon's wide, aerial waste." The "power of
hills" was on him. Like Wordsworth, too, he moralized his song. In
"Grongar Hill," the ruined tower suggests the transience of h