A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 10

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, "c.u.mbent 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 pa.s.sage, which Wordsworth alludes to in his sonnet on Dyer--"Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill":

"Gra.s.s 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 "s.p.a.cious 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 human 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 coa.r.s.e 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," p.r.o.nounced 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 cla.s.s has to be _made_ poetical, by dragging in episodes and digressions which do not inhere in the subject itself but are artificially a.s.sociated 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 ma.n.u.script of "The Fleece," said that "he would regulate his opinion of the reigning taste by the fate of Dyer's 'Fleece'; for if that were ill received, he should not think it any longer reasonable to expect fame from excellence." The romantic element in Dyer's imagination appears princ.i.p.ally in his love of the mountains and of ancient ruins. Johnson cites with approval a sentence in "The Ruins of Rome":

"At dead of night, The hermit oft, midst his orisons, hears Aghast the voice of Time disparting towers."[49]

These were cla.s.sic ruins. Perhaps the doctor's sympathy would not have been so quickly extended to the picture of the moldering Gothic tower in "Grongar Hill," or of "solitary Stonehenge gray with moss," in "The Fleece."

[1] W. D. McClintock, "The Romantic and Cla.s.sical in English Literature,"

_Chautauquan_, Vol. XIV, p. 187.

[2] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 207.

[3] "Autumn," lines 645-47.

[4] "Life of Philips."

[5] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 221

[6] _Cf_. Chaucer: "And as a bitoure b.u.mbleth in the mire."

--_Wyf of Bathes Tale_.

[7] Phillimore's "Life of Lyttelton," Vol. I, p. 286.

[8] "First Impression of England," p. 135.

[9] Appendix to Preface to the Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads,"

[10] There are, of course, Miltonic reminiscences in "The Seasons." The moon's "spotted disk" ("Autumn," 1091) is Milton's "spotty globe." The apostrophe to light ("Spring" 90-96) borrows its "efflux divine" from Milton's "bright effluence of bright essence increate" ("Paradise Lost,"

III. 1-12) And _cf._ "Autumn," 783-84:

"--from Imaus stretcht Athwart the roving Tartar's sullen bounds,"

with P.L., III, 431-32; and "Winter," 1005-08.

"--moors Beneath the shelter of an icy isle, While night o'erwhelms the sea."

with P.L., I. 207-208.

[11] "Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. p. 171.

[12] There were originally _three_ damsels in the bathing scene!

[13] It was to this episode that Pope supplied the lines (207-14)

"Thoughtless of beauty, she was beauty's self," etc.,

which form his solitary essay in blank verse. Thomson told Collins that he took the first hint of "The Seasons" from the names of the divisions--Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter--in Pope's "Pastorals."

[14] Appendix to Preface to Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads."

[15] "The Hermit."

[16] "Essay on Man," Epistle I.

[17] "Falsely luxurious, will not man awake?" etc.

--_Summer_, 67.

[18] "Nor, when cold winter keens the brightening flood, Would I, weak shivering, linger on the brink."

--_Ibid._ 1259-60.

[19] "Life of Thomson."

[20] "Spring," 755-58.

[21] "Autumn," 862-65.