How close and small the hedges lie! What streaks of meadows cross the eye! A step methinks may pass the stream, So little distant dangers seem; So we mistake the Future's face, Ey'd thro' Hope's deluding glass; As yon summits soft and fair, Clad in colours of the air, Which, to those who journey near, Barren, and brown, and rough appear, Still we tread tir'd the same coarse way, The present's still a cloudy day. It takes a good poet to strike a clear note, with no indecision, in the opening lines of his poem, as Dyer does in _The Country Walk_: I am resolv'd, this charming day, In the open fields to stray; And have no roof above my head But that whereon the Gods do tread. His landscapes are delicately etched, and are loved for their own sake: And there behold a bloomy mead, A silver stream, a willow shade, Beneath the shade a fisher stand, Who, with the angle in his hand, Swings the nibbling fry to land. It would be absurd to speak solemnly of Dyer's debt to Milton; he is an original poet; but the writer of the lines quoted above can never have been blind to the beauties of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_. His two arts brought him little material prosperity; in 1740 he took orders in the Church of England, and in his later years did harm to his fame by a long industrial poem called _The Fleece_, which has on it none of the dew that glistens on his youthful verses. James Thomson, who won a great reputation in his own age, was the son of a parish minister in Scotland. He was educated in Edinburgh, and came to London to seek his fortune. All Thomson's work shows the new tendencies in poetry struggling with the accepted fashions. His language in _The Seasons_ is habitually rhetorical and stilted, yet there is hardly a page without its vignettes of truth and beauty. When he forgets what he has learned in the Rhetoric class, and falls back on his own memories and likings, the poet in him reappears. In _The Castle of Indolence_, published just before his death in 1748, he imitates Spenser. One stanza of this poem is more famous than all the rest; it is pure and high romance: As when a shepherd of the Hebrid-Isles, Placed far amid the melancholy main, (Whether it be lone fancy him beguiles, Or that aerial beings sometimes deign To stand embodied to our senses plain), Sees on the naked hill, or valley low, The whilst in ocean Phoebus dips his wain, A vast assembly moving to and fro; Then all at once in air dissolves the wondrous show.