“Mr. Dyer,” wrote Gray to Horace Walpole in 1751, “has more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number; but rough and injudicious.”  Akenside, who helped Dyer polish the manuscript of “The Fleece,” said that “he would regulate his opinion of the reigning taste by the fate of Dyer’s ‘Fleece’; for if that were ill received, he should not think it any longer reasonable to expect fame from excellence.”  The romantic element in Dyer’s imagination appears principally in his love of the mountains and of ancient ruins.  Johnson cites with approval a sentence in “The Ruins of Rome”: 

                    “At dead of night,
    The hermit oft, midst his orisons, hears
    Aghast the voice of Time disparting towers."[49]

These were classic ruins.  Perhaps the doctor’s sympathy would not have been so quickly extended to the picture of the moldering Gothic tower in “Grongar Hill,” or of “solitary Stonehenge gray with moss,” in “The Fleece.”

[1] W. D. McClintock, “The Romantic and Classical in English Literature,” Chautauquan, Vol.  XIV, p. 187.

[2] “Eighteenth Century Literature,” p. 207.

[3] “Autumn,” lines 645-47.

[4] “Life of Philips.”

[5] “Eighteenth Century Literature,” p. 221

[6] Cf.  Chaucer:  “And as a bitoure bumbleth in the mire.”
                —­Wyf of Bathes Tale.

[7] Phillimore’s “Life of Lyttelton,” Vol.  I, p. 286.

[8] “First Impression of England,” p. 135.

[9] Appendix to Preface to the Second Edition of “Lyrical Ballads,”

[10] There are, of course, Miltonic reminiscences in “The Seasons.”  The moon’s “spotted disk” ("Autumn,” 1091) is Milton’s “spotty globe.”  The apostrophe to light ("Spring” 90-96) borrows its “efflux divine” from Milton’s “bright effluence of bright essence increate” ("Paradise Lost,” III. 1-12) And cf. “Autumn,” 783-84: 

                “—­from Imaus stretcht
    Athwart the roving Tartar’s sullen bounds,”

with P.L., III, 431-32; and “Winter,” 1005-08.

                “—­moors
    Beneath the shelter of an icy isle,
    While night o’erwhelms the sea.”

with P.L., I. 207-208.

[11] “Ward’s English Poets,” Vol.  III. p. 171.

[12] There were originally three damsels in the bathing scene!

[13] It was to this episode that Pope supplied the lines (207-14)

“Thoughtless of beauty, she was beauty’s self,” etc.,

which form his solitary essay in blank verse.  Thomson told Collins that he took the first hint of “The Seasons” from the names of the divisions—­Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter—­in Pope’s “Pastorals.”

[14] Appendix to Preface to Second Edition of “Lyrical Ballads.”

[15] “The Hermit.”

[16] “Essay on Man,” Epistle I.

[17] “Falsely luxurious, will not man awake?” etc.
           —­Summer, 67.