There was a time, I heard her say, To Love and her unknown. From these th' indignant goddess flies, But pedant Pride and Rage are there, Long through the sky's wide pathless way There she beholds the gentle Mole There through the windings of the grove And strews her sweets around. I hear her bid the daughters fair Her secret steps to meet: "Nor thou," she cries, "these shades forsake, But come, lov'd consort, come and make Yet not too much the soothing ease My Pelham's ardent breast; The man whom Virtue calls her own Pelham! 'tis thine with temp'rate zeal Her fatal discords to compose, When bold Rebellion shook the land, When Valour droop'd, and Wisdom fear'd, And rais'd her languid head. Now by thy strong assisting hand, In vain, through every future age, The loudest, most tempestuous rage And grieve not if the sons of Strife Like these, the metaphysic crew, JOHN DYER. BORN 1700.-DIED 1758. DYER was the son of a solicitor at Aberglasney, in Caermarthenshire. He was educated at Westminster school, and returned from thence to be instructed in his father's profession, but left it for poetry and painting; and having studied the arts of design under a master, was for some time, as he says, an itinerant painter in Wales. Dividing his affections, however, between the sister Muses, he indited his Grongar Hill amidst those excursions. It was published about his twenty-seventh year. He afterwards made the tour of Italy in the spirit both of an artist and poet, and, besides studying pictures and prospects, composed a poem on the Ruins of Rome. On his return to England he married a lady of the name of Ensor, a descendant of Shakspeare, retired into the country, and entered into orders. His last preferment was to the living of Kirkley on Bane. The witticism on his Fleece, related by Dr. Johnson, that its author, if he was an old man, would be buried in woollen, has perhaps been oftener repeated than any passage in the poem itself. GRONGAR HILL. SILENT nymph, with curious eye! Grongar Hill invites my song, Sweetly musing, Quiet dwells; Sat upon a flowery bed, With my While stray'd my eyes o'er Towy's flood, Over mead, and over wood, From house to house, from hill to hill, 2 About his chequer'd sides I wind, And leave his brooks and meads behind, And groves, and grottos where I lay, And vistos shooting beams of day: Wide and wider spreads the vale; As circles on a smooth canal: The mountains round, unhappy fate, Sooner or later, of all height, Withdraw their summits from the skies, And lessen as the others rise: Still the prospect wider spreads, Adds a thousand woods and meads; Still it widens, widens still, And sinks the newly-risen hill. Now I gain the mountain's brow, What a landscape lies below! |