There is not the slightest extravagance, from any catholic point of view over poetry, in calling _Grongar Hill_ simply beautiful. I think it deserves that term better than anything of Gray's, though not perhaps quite so well as some things of Collins's in the first half of the century; while nothing outside them can touch it, and it came before both. Its attractions, to a somewhat close student, are manifold, not the least of them being the fashion in which, for the first time since Milton, and in a way not directly imitated even from him, it moulds the couplet of mixed eight and seven syllable lines. But one need not neglect the late Mr. Lowell's remark that when Edgar Poe talked of iambs and pentameters he made other people d----n metres. The poem has plenty of other attractions for the most untechnical reader. Dyer, who was himself a painter, invokes the Muse of Painting as well as Her of Poetry, and it is really remarkable how, at this time when hardly anybody is supposed to have had his eye on nature except Thomson, and in the very year of _Winter_ itself, full eighty, too, before Scott provoked from Pitt his famous surprise that verse should be able to express the effect of painting--how visual as well as audible effect is produced. The exordium to the Silent nymph with curious eye, Who in the purple evening lie On the mountain's lonely van; the following description of the landscape in general with its unusual and extraordinarily true conclusion: And swelling to embrace the light, Spreads around beneath the sight, in which everybody who has after climbing a hill turned round and seen the prospect must acknowledge the felicity of "swelling," though he may never have formulated the appearance before; the details of wood, and ruin, and river, with the sudden and just sufficient moral: A little rule, a little sway, A sunbeam on a winter's day; for the castle, and for the rivers: Sometimes swift, sometimes slow, Wave succeeding wave they go, A various journey to the deep, Like human life to endless sleep; the fillings in of various detail and the penultimate passage formed into a sort of roundel: Now, even now, my joys run high As on the mountain turf I lie, While the wanton Zephyr sings And in the vale perfumes his wings; While the waters murmur deep, While the shepherd charms his sheep, While the birds unbounded fly, And with music fill the sky-- Now, even now, my joys run high;