by critics have figured Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Salvator Rosa, the latter of whom was, like Dyer, both a poet and painter. The mellow light effects of Dyer's poem are certainly Claude's, but without the Classical trappings. As a vista, with the abrupt ascent rising from the river in the foreground, leading to a view of distant towers, it approximates more closely to Rosa's "Mountain Landscape", now in Southampton Art Gallery. Another way in which Dyer's poem differed from much that had gone before, and is prophetic of the change in sensibility to come, is its personal tone. What is drawn by him out of the landscape are not the gleanings of his bookshelf but reflections "so consonant to the general sense or experience of mankind, that when it is once read, it will be read again", as Samuel Johnson observed. In the words of a later commentator, "his gentle, quaintly precise moralizing is unlike the typical classical didacticism in that it seems to spring inevitably from the effect of natural objects on the poet's mind, instead of being itself a main thing and laboriously illustrated by such natural facts as came to hand." It was by means of such generalised humanism, says another, that Dyer “broke with tradition by making himself, as both poet and person, an object of study and contemplation.” The interest of the last two critics was in tracing the thread that leads from the neo-classicism of Dyer's time to the personalised Romantic vision of nature. For William Wordsworth, in his sonnet addressed to the poet, Dyer is rescued from the fashionable preference formerly given unworthier models by his ability to conjure up “a living landscape” that will ultimately be remembered "Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill." Here Wordsworth refers to the final lines of Dyer's poem. But in fact the whole of it fits the Wordsworthian paradigm. At the very beginning, Dyer invokes the "sister muse" lying on the mountain top, as he had done himself in the past, to call up the memory of the scene. In this way the poem's inward reflective quality reaches towards that "emotion recollected in tranquillity" which was Wordsworth's own definition of the wellspring of poetry. "The emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually