The prevailing interest in these poems is in Nature, but there are one or two charming pictures of homely life. The old man’s hut and garden on the edge of the wood, and the barnyard scene are as attractive as they are realistic. And surely the tattered old man digging up cabbage in the shade might have been expected to wait at least for Crabbe or Wordsworth to introduce him into the select company of the Muses. The same may be said of the tramp asleep by the roadside.[339] In any tabulation Dyer’s use of Nature would seem to be much more abundant than it is for in “The Fleece” he of necessity used a large number of geographical details merely to mark out localities and with no more literary quality than there would be on a map. His chief use of Nature is twofold, and is best seen in the short poems, “Grongar Hill” and “The Country Walk.” He describes a landscape with loving minuteness for its own sake, and he regards it as the occasion for a strain of half-melancholy reflection on human life. This gentle, quaintly precise moralizing is unlike the typical classical didacticism in that it seems to spring inevitably from the effect of natural objects on the poet’s mind, instead of being itself a main thing and laboriously illustrated by such natural facts as came to hand. The entire impression made by the two poems is that they were written by one who knew Nature better than books. The negative as well as the positive qualities of the poem show this. There are almost no conventional phrases.[340] Of the personified abstract qualities, two at least, Pleasure and Quiet, are so imaginatively conceived as not to belong to the category of cold classical personifications. The only classical allusion is significant as being to the “fair Castalian springs” “deserted now” by all but “slavish hinds.”[341] But the poems show something more than first-hand as opposed to bookish knowledge of Nature. Their author evidently loved to linger over the charms of Nature in solitude, to let them sink into his mind and heart. There is a power of quiet contemplation, of “wise passiveness,” such as Thomson never knew. The closing lines of “Grongar Hill,” Be full, ye courts; be great who will; Search for Peace with all your skill: Open wide the lofty door, Seek her on the marble floor, In vain you search, she is not there; In vain ye search the domes of care! Grass and flowers Quiet treads, On the meads, and mountain heads, Along with Pleasure, close-ally’d, Ever by each other’s side: And often, by the murmuring rill, Hears the thrush, while all is still, Within the groves of Grongar Hill, show a wonderfully true and delicate apprehension of the spiritual influences that speak through Nature’s forms. It is putting into plainer words what was the underlying conception in Parnell’s “Hymn to Contentment.”