“Who that from Alpine heights his laboring eye
    Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey
    Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave
    Through mountains, plains, through empires black with shade. 
    And continents of sand, will turn his gaze
    To mark the windings of a scanty rill
    That murmurs at his feet?  The high-born soul
    Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing
    Beneath its native quarry.  Tired of earth
    And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft
    Through fields of air; pursues the flying storm;
    Rides on the vollied lightning through the heavens;
    Or, yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast,
    Sweeps the long trace of day.”

The hint for this passage was furnished by a paragraph in Addison’s second paper (Spectator, 412) and the emotion is the same to which Goethe gives utterance in the well-known lines of “Faust”;

    “Doch jedem ist es eingeboren
    Dass sein Gefuehl hinauf und vorwaerts dringt,” etc.

But how greatly superior in sharpness of detail, richness of invention, energy of movement is the German to the English poet!

Akenside ranks among the earlier Spenserians by virtue of his “Virtuoso” (1737) and of several odes composed in a ten-lined variation on Spenser’s stanza.  A collection of his “Odes” appeared in 1745—­the year before Collins’ and Joseph Warton’s-and a second in 1760.  They are of little value, but show here and there traces of Milton’s minor poetry and that elegiac sentiment, common to the lyrical verse of the time, noticeable particularly in a passage on the nightingale in Ode XV, book i;, “To the Evening Star.”  “The Pleasures of Imagination” was the parent of a numerous offspring of similarly entitled pieces, among which are Joseph Warton’s “Pleasures of Melancholy,” Campbell’s “Pleasures of Hope,” and Rogers’ “Pleasures of Memory.”

In the same year with Thomson’s “Winter” (1726) there were published in two poetical miscellanies a pair of little descriptive pieces, “Grongar Hill” and “The Country Walk,” written by John Dyer, a young Welshman, in the octosyllabic couplet of Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Pensoroso.”  ("Grongar Hill,” as first printed was a sort of irregular ode with alternate rhyming; but it was much improvised in later editions, and rewritten throughout in couplets.)

Dyer was a landscape painter who had been educated at Westminster school, studied under Richardson at London, and spent some time wandering about the mountains of Wales in the practice of his art.  “Grongar Hill” is, in fact, a pictorial poem, a sketch of the landscape seen from the top of his favorite summit in South Wales.  It is a slight piece of work, careless and even slovenly in execution, but with an ease and lightness of touch that contrast pleasantly with Thomson’s and Akenside’s ponderosity.  When Dyer wrote blank verse he slipped into the Thomsonian diction, “cumbent sheep” and “purple groves pomaceous.”  But in “Grongar Hill”—­although he does call the sun Phoebus—­the shorter measure seems to bring shorter words, and he has lines of Wordsworthian simplicity—­