Page:The Poems of John Dyer (1903).djvu/17

 helped him in the work. It is his biggest effort, and when we consider the subject, his greatest success. A very large proportion of dulness is to be expected from Dyer on wool; but it does not obscure the excellence of his design; even where his thought is rustic, the style is pure; in some places he is nearly grand; in many, felicitous. These isolated lines are characteristic of Dyer at his best:

"Or the tall growth of glossy-rinded beech,"

"No prickly brambles, white with woolly theft,"

"Rolling by ruins hoar of antient towns,"

"Long lay the mournful realms of elder fame In gloomy desolation"

"Nor what the peasant, near some lucid wave, Pactolus, Simoïs or Meander slow, Renowned in story, with his plough upturns."

Wordsworth found parts of the poem "dry and heavy," and parts superior to any writer in verse since Milton, for imagination and purity of style. It was praised, among Dyer's contemporaries, by Dr James Grainger, a verse-writer in The Monthly Review, and by Gray.

I do not think it necessary to add much size and no light to this volume, by commenting on the numerous proper names of men and places in "The Fleece." I have retained Dyer's spelling—e.g. "Mincoy" for "Minikoi"—almost as it was in the first edition. His abbreviations—as "ev'n" for