uman life:
the rivers running down to the sea are likened to man's career from birth
to death; and Campbell's couplet,

"'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view
And robes the mountain in its azure hue,"[48]

is thought to owe something to Dyer's

"As yon summits soft and fair,
Clad in colors of the air
Which to those who journey near
Barren, brown and rough appear,
Still we tread the same coarse way,
The present's still a cloudy day."

Dyer went to Rome to pursue his art studies and, on his return in 1740,
published his "Ruins of Rome" in blank verse. He was not very successful
as a painter, and finally took orders, married, and settled down as a
country parson. In 1757 he published his most ambitious work, "The
Fleece," a poem in blank verse and in four books, descriptive of English
wool-growing. "The subject of 'The Fleece,' sir," pronounced Johnson,
"cannot be made poetical. How can a man write poetically of serges and
druggets?" Didactic poetry, in truth, leads too often to ludicrous
descents. Such precepts as "beware the rot," "enclose, enclose, ye
swains," and

"-the utility of salt
Teach thy slow swains";

with prescriptions for the scab, and advice as to divers kinds of wool
combs, are fatal. A poem of this class has to be _made_ poetical, by
dragging in episodes and digressions which do not inhere in the subject
itself but are artificially associated with it. Of such a nature is the
loving mention--quoted in Wordsworth's sonnet--of the poet's native
Carmarthenshire

"-that soft tract
Of Cambria, deep embayed, Dimetian land,
By green hills fenced, by Ocean's murmur lulled."

Lowell admired the line about the Siberian exiles, met

"On the dark level of adversity."

Miltonic reminiscences are frequent in Dyer. Sabrina is borrowed from
"Comus"; "bosky bourn" and "soothest shepherd" from the same; "the light
fantastic toe" from "L'Allegro"; "level brine" and "nor taint-worm shall
infect the yearning herds," from "Lycidas"; "audience pure be thy
delight, though few," from "Paradise Lost."

"Mr. Dyer," wrote Gray to Horace Walpole in 1751, "has more of poetry in
his imagination than almost any of our number; but rough and
injudicious." Akenside, who helped Dyer polish the manuscript of "The
Fleece," said that "he would regulate his opinion of the reigning taste
by the fate of Dyer's 'Fleece'; for if that wer