When he leaves this second-hand description, and describes scenes actually experienced and strongly felt, Falconer’s language is correspondingly fresh and vivid, the catastrophe of the shipwreck itself, for example, being painted with extraordinary power.[77]
When we come to Johnson and Goldsmith, here again a distinction must be made between the didactic or satiric portion of their work and that which is descriptive. Johnson’s didactic verse, marked as it is by a free use of inversion and ellipsis, rarely attains the clearness and simplicity of Goldsmith’s, whilst he has also much more of the stock descriptive terms and phrases. His “Odes” are almost entirely cast in this style. Thus in “Spring”:
Now o’er the rural Kingdom roves
Soft Pleasure with her laughing train,
Love warbles in the vocal groves
And vegetation plants the plains,
whilst exactly the same stuff is turned out for a love poem, “To Stella”:
Not the soft sighs of vernal gales
The fragrance of the flowery vales
The murmurs of the crystal rill