s park's extended bounds,
Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds:

* * * * *

His seat, where solitary sports are seen,
Indignant spurns the cottage from the green:"

--and so forth. This seldom happens; but it does happen; and it has
happened, in our own day, in England. It is within the last twenty
years that an English landlord, having faith in his riches, bade a
village be removed and cast elsewhere, so that it should no longer be
visible from his windows: and it was forthwith removed. But any
solitary instance like this is not sufficient to support the theory
that wealth and luxury are inimical to the existence of a hardy
peasantry; and so we must admit, after all, that it is poetical
exigency rather than political economy that has decreed the
destruction of the loveliest village of the plain. Where, asks the
poet, are the driven poor to find refuge, when even the fenceless
commons are seized upon and divided by the rich? In the great
cities?--

"To see profusion that he must not share;
To see ten thousand baneful arts combined
To pamper luxury and thin mankind."

It is in this description of a life in cities that there occurs an
often-quoted passage, which has in it one of the most perfect lines in
English poetry:--

"Ah, turn thine eyes
Where the poor houseless shivering female lies.
She once, perhaps, in village plenty blest,
Has wept at tales of innocence distrest;
Her modest looks the cottage might adorn,
Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn;
Now lost to all; her friends, her virtue fled,
Near her betrayer's door she lays her head.
And, pinch'd with cold, and shrinking from the shower,
With heavy heart deplores that luckless hour,
When idly first, ambitious of the town,
She left her wheel and robes of country brown."

Goldsmith wrote in a pre-Wordsworthian age, when, even in the realms
of poetry, a primrose was not much more than a primrose; but it is
doubtful whether, either before, during, or since Wordsworth's time
the sentiment that the imagination can infuse into the common and
familiar things around us ever received more happy expression than in
the well-known line,

"_Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn._"

No one has as yet succeeded in defining accurately and concisely what
poetry is; but at all events this line is surcharged