. There is in both
a heartiness which discards the formalized emotion, prefers the touch of
nature and the homely adjective. The characteristic is almost feminine
in the description of Auburn: "_Dear_ lovely bowers"; it is inevitable,
artless, in 'The Traveller': "His first, best country ever is at home."
But on the other hand, the _curiosa felicitas_ marks every line, the
nice selection of just the word or phrase richest in association,
redolent of tradition, harmonious, classically proper, but still
natural, true, and apt. "My heart untravell'd fondly turns to thee"--not
a word but is hearty; and for all that, the line is stamped with the
academic authority of centuries: "Coelum, non animum mutant, qui trans
mare currunt." Both poems are characterized by the infrequency of
epithet and figure,--the infrequency that marks sincerity and that
heightens pleasure,--and by a cunning in the use of proper names,
resonant, remote, suggestive: "On Idra's cliffs or Arno's shelvy
side,"--the cunning of a musical poem. Both poems vibrate with
personality, recall the experience of the writer. It would be hard to
choose between them; but 'The Deserted Village' strikes the homelier
chord, comes nearer, with its natural pathos, its sidelong smile, and
its perennial novelty, to the heart of him who knows.

Goldsmith is less eloquent but more natural than Dryden, less precise
but more simple than Pope. In poetic sensibility he has the advantage of
both. Were the volume of his verse not so slight, were his conceptions
more sublime, and their embodiment more epic or dramatic, he might rank
with the greatest of his century. As it is, in imaginative insight he
has no superior in the eighteenth century; in observation, pathos,
representative power, no equal: Dryden, Pope, Gray, Thomson,
Young,--none but Collins approaches him. The reflective or descriptive
poem can of course not compete with the drama, epic, or even lyric of
corresponding merit in its respective kind. But Goldsmith's poems are
the best of their kind, better than all but the best in other kinds. His
conception of life is more generous and direct, hence truer and gentler,
than that of the Augustan age. Raising no revolt against classical
principles, he rejects the artifices of decadent classicism, returns to
nature, and expresses _it_ simply. He is consequently in this respect
the harbinger of Cowper, Crabbe, Bloomfield, Clare, Wordsworth, and
Coleridge. In technique also he br