When Fate extends its gathering gripe, Thus, thus I steer my bark, and sail My crew of passions all submit. If dark and blustering prove some nights, ON BARCLAY'S APOLOGY FOR THE QUAKERS. These sheets primæval doctrines yield, Where revelation is reveal'd; Soul-phlegm from literal feeding bred, Systems lethargic to the head They purge, and yield a diet thin, That turns to gospel-chyle within. Truth sublimate may here be seen Since all unhired may preach and pray, Well-natured, happy shade, forgive! Like you I think, but cannot live. Thy scheme requires the world's contempt, That, from dependence life exempt ; And constitution fram'd so strong, This world's worst climate cannot wrong. Eloquent Want, whose reasons sway, While I your scheme with pleasure trace, See, how you like my rueful face, They, who have lands, and safe bank-stock, The crows, that brought him bread and meat. JOHN DYER. [BORN at Aberglasney, Caermarthenshire, 1698 or 1699; died 1758. Grongar Hill was published 1726; The Ruins of Rome, 1740; The Fleece, 1757-] 'The subject of the Fleece, sir, cannot be made poetical. How can a man write poetically of serges and druggets?' So, in his way of prompt finality, pronounced Johnson the dictator. Yet Akenside, whose poetical aims were sufficiently remote from the common, had declared that he would regulate his opinion of the reigning taste by the fate of Dyer's Fleece; 'if that were ill received he should not think it any longer reasonable to expect fame from excellence.' Gray ventured to brave the elegant disdain of Horace Walpole by affirming that Mr. Dyer has more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number.' And one in our own century, of loftier genius than Gray, looking back from his Westmoreland solitudes to his humbler brother poet among the Cambrian hills, has left his protest against the injustice of 'hasty Fame' in her neglect of Dyer: '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.' The power of hills was not on Johnson; Fleet Street, with its roar, had more music for his ear than the piping of a thrush or the tender clamour of the mother-ewes. Grongar Hill, and The Country Walk, appeared in Poetical Miscellanies of the year 1726, the same year that saw the publica tion of Thomson's Winter. It was the year in which Pope was imagining his goddess of Dulness, as she surveyed through fog her long succession of Grub Street children. From remote Scotland and from Southern Wales came a gift to English poetry which neither Grub Street nor Twickenham could bestow. While Pope, a paladin in ruffles and periwig, was doing to death by exquisite rapier-thrusts the swarming hosts of Dulness, his own position was threatened unawares. That poetry of external nature which was to alienate for a season the general heart from such poetry as his, was already inaugurated by the youthful singers of Winter and of Grongar Hill. Dyer had been for a time pupil to the painter Richardson, and master and pupil may have laid down their brushes now and again to con over some passage of Milton, whom they both knew well and honoured. In Dyer's love of landscape there is something of the painter's feeling; he loves a wide prospect, diversified by stream and wood, backed by blue aërial steeps solemnly vast'; the effect is heightened if the landscape include the ragged walls of some crumbling castle, or some peasant's smoky nest leaning against its gnarled tree. There remains but to add a human figure or two-an old man white-bearded, in weed ragged and brown, leaning on his spade in the little garden, or a fisher in the willow shade, 'Who with the angle in his hand The poetry of ruins was not reserved for the romantic second half of the century. It is Dyer who describes The spacious plain Of Sarum, spread like ocean's boundless round, And Johnson could not withhold his admiration from some lines conceived among Rome's 'dilapidating edifices.' "The Pilgrim oft At dead of night, mid his oraison hears Rattling around loud thundering to the moon.' |