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THE

LIFE OF JOHN DYER.

JOHN DYER, the author of "The Fleece," as he would probably have wished himself, par excellence, styled—the author of "Grongar-hill," as his readers would more cheerfully hail him-is one of the few British poets who have arisen in the principality of Wales, rich as that country is in scenerywhich may be called the materiel of poets, and as it was of old, in mountain bards, ranging in their minstrelsies from

"High born Hoel's harp to soft Llewellyn's lay."

He was born in the year 1700, in Caermarthenshire, and was the son of Robert Dyer of Aberglasney, a solicitor of great reputation. John was educated at Westminster school, under Dr Freind, and was then brought home to follow his father's profession. We can easily understand from the imaginative temperament of Dyer how law should prove distasteful to him. He had not that highest form of the ideal faculty, possessed by such men as Cicero and Burke, through which they were able to transfigure the dry and dead bones of politics, finance, and legal technicalities into living and glorious shapes-to find poetry in stones, and beauty in everything. Dyer's endowment was not of such a catholic and magical kind. Shrinking from his law studies with an unconquerable aversion, he turned to the more congenial field of the fine arts. When his father died, and he was left to the freedom of his will, he determined to become a painter-at heart he had been always a poet. He removed to London, and studied under Richardson, then residing in Lincolns-Inn-Fields, and

possessing a high reputation as an artist, although his paintings are long since forgotten, and his fame now rests entirely on his writings, which are still quoted as authorities on art. After studying some time under Richardson, Dyer betook himself to South Wales, and led there the life of an itinerant painter. This, we doubt not, he found a delightful, although a precarious mode of life, leading him, as it did, through all the varieties of beautiful scenery with which that country abounds, introducing him to human life in its numerous diversities, and giving him leisure, as well as ministering inspiration, for the occasional practice of his favourite art— poetry. A more interesting or romantic figure cannot be conceived than that of one who is at once a painter and a poet, passing through a beautiful country, equally ready to use his pencil or his pen, and to spread abroad either his photographic page or his glowing canvas. And where the enthusiasm, as in Dyer's case, is fresh and young, what a delightful occupation that of a landscape-painter is. Nature is his beloved, and wherever her face shines, his heart is glad. He follows her into her most retired nooks and corners. He sees

her in all her phases and forms. He looks at her, not with a cold and careless, nor yet with a wide and vague, but with a minute and watchful eye. He is deep, not only in her general aspects, but in her secret cipher, and acquainted with her. most retired and evanescent glories. Singular aspects of the sky and of the earth, tints in flowers, motions of shadows and of sunbeams, effects of morning or of evening air upon landscapes, the evanishing splendours into which light kindles up the sides of mountains and the tops of trees, passing looks of loveliness or frowns of skyey terror shed down by wandering clouds upon river or lake or meadow, such appearances, lost upon the eyes of others, are seen, admired, and recorded by the painter. He is a friendly spy upon nature, go where she will, and do what she please. A graceful alias of the poet, a genuine and bending worshipper of the forms by which the great Artist has redeemed His creation from chaos, and of the colours by which He has enchanted it into heaven; the painter himself, too, becomes one of the finest objects in the land

scapes of earth, as seen sitting motionless under the rainbow, or dumb, as the pencil of the lightning is dashing its fiery lines upon the black scroll of the thunder-cloud, or leaning over the old ruined bridge, and perchance, in his reverie, dropping his pencil into the bubbling stream, or seated, like Gainsborough, from morning to night upon the rustic stile, or copying with severe sympathy from the cataract, with a rain of bright berries and green leaves descending on him from the rowan tree behind, or more ambitiously “knitting" the mountain to the sky on a crag above the eagle's eyrie.

Thus sat the young Dyer on many a mountain in Wales, on Cader-Idris, on Plinlimmon, and on the mighty Snowdon itself. But there was one lower hill that seemed dearer to him far, and which has now become the principal foundation of his fame. This was Grongar-hill, in the southern part of the principality. Whether this hill ever employed Dyer's pencil we know not, but from it he has extracted some exquisite poetry. His Grongar-hill was published originally as an "Irregular Ode," in what is called "a miscellany volume of poems,” collected and published by poor Savage in 1726. It appeared first in a very imperfect shape, and began with the following verse :—

“Fancy, nymph that loves to lie

On the lonely eminence,

Darting notice through the eye,

Forming thought and feasting sense;
Thou that must lend imagination wings,

And stamp distinction on all worldly things
Come, and with thy various hues,

Paint and adorn thy sister muse.”

He improved it much in subsequent editions.

Some time after, but at what date is uncertain, Dyer, to perfect himself in the pictorial art, repaired to Rome. Byron has apostrophised the Eternal City in the well-known lines“O Rome, my country, city of the soul,

The orphans of the heart must turn to thee." This is an exclamation still more suitable to the votaries of painting than of poetry. Rome is their country, the city of their soul, the mother of their otherwise orphaned heart.

Many men of high genius have never been in Rome, but it is remarkable that almost all great painters in modern times, and the majority of great British poets, such as Milton, Addison, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, the Brownings, and we believe also Tennyson, have seen Rome, and have profited by the contemplation of its stupendous ruins, its eloquent decay, its death-like silence, and the gigantic memories which walk for ever on tiptoe, like trembling ghosts, through its desolate streets. To the poet, however, a visit to Rome is less essential than to the painter. This is proved by a fact to which we may again advert, that the best description of the Coliseum, in all poetry, was written by a gentleman who had never been in Rome. But no painter can take a high place who has not learned to dip his pencil in the golden light which hovers over the Capitol, tinges the waves of the Tiber, gilds the dusky tomes in the library of the Vatican, and darts its shafts of glory through the thick umbrage and ragged rents of the baths of Caracalla. The art-enriched atmosphere of Rome forms a Pactolus, in which every aspirant must bathe ere he can be able to cry, "I also am a painter." The poet finds there principally memories, but the painter finds both memories and models; and, while his taste receives a culture which no other place in the world can bestow, an enthusiasm for art is enkindled within him, which time may modify and tame, but can never quench. How contemptible everything in art that is mean, meretricious, merely calculated for present effect, must seem beside those solemn and serene creations of the pencil and the chisel, on which hundreds of years have set their seal; and how petty ambition must expire in the shadow of His genius whose fierce hammer hewed out the Moses amidst a storm of stone. spray, whose pencil garnished the dread heaven of the roof of the Sistine Chapel, and who hung the dome of St Peter's in the blue of an Italian sky, to be a joy, a beauty, and a terror while that sky continues to bend over the ruins of Rome!

To Rome then went our poet to study art, and to gather materials for a new and more elaborate effort of his genius.

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