GOLDSMITH.
The amiable and versatile Goldsmith looks at Nature, as he passes along, with a less moralizing eye than the sombre-minded Gray. In his earliest long poem, “The Traveller,” published in 1765, though he surveys many lands, his eye dwells on man and society rather than on the outward world. In remarkable contrast to more recent English poets, though he passes beneath the shadow of the Alps, he looks up to them with shuddering horror rather than with any kindling of soul. The mountain glory had not yet burst on the souls of men. The one thought that strikes him is the hard lot of the mountaineers. Such conventional lines as these are all that he has for the mountains themselves:—
“No vernal blooms their torpid rocks array,
But winter lingers in the lap of May;
No zephyr fondly sues the mountain’s breast,
But meteors glare, and stormy glooms invest.”
It is only when he thinks of the Switzer’s love for them that they become interesting:—
“Dear is the shed to which his soul conforms,
And dear that hill which lifts him to the storms;
And as a child, when scaring sounds molest,
Clings close and closer to his mother’s breast,
So the loud torrent, and the whirlwind’s roar,
But bind him to his native mountains more.”
This poem, however, is remarkable as the first expression in English verse of that personal interest in foreign scenes and people which has kindled so many a splendid strain of our more recent poetry. But it is in “The Deserted Village,” his best known poem, that he has most fully shown the grace and truthfulness with which he could touch natural scenes. Lissoy, an Irish village where the poet’s brother had a living, is said to have been the original from which he drew. In the poem, the church which crowns the neighboring hill, the mill, the brook, the hawthorn-tree, are all taken straight from the outer world. The features of Nature and the works of man, the parsonage, the school-house, the ale-house, all harmonize in one picture, and though the feeling of desolation must needs be a melancholy one, yet it is wonderfully varied and relieved by the uncolored faithfulness of the pictures from Nature and the kindly humor of those of man. It is needless to quote from a poem which every one knows so well. The verse of Pope is not the best vehicle for rural description, but it never was employed with greater grace and transparency than in “The Deserted Village.” In that poem there is fine feeling for Nature, in her homely forms, and truthful description of these, but beyond this Goldsmith does not venture. The pathos of the outward world in its connection with man is there, but no reference to the meaning of Nature in itself, much less any question of its relation to the Divine Being and a supersensible world.