"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 were ill received, he should not think it any longer reasonable to expect fame from excellence." The romantic element in Dyer's imagination appears principally 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 classic 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 Classical in English Literature," _Chautauquan_, Vol. XIV, p. 187. [2] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 207.