Akenside ranks among the earlier Spenserians by virtue of his "Virtuoso" (1737) and of several odes composed in a ten-lined variation on Spenser's stanza. A collection of his "Odes" appeared in 1745--the 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 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