The vocal grove, the verdant hill.
Though there is not so much of this kind of otiose description in the poems of Goldsmith, yet Mr. Dobson’s estimate of his language may be accepted as a just one: “In spite of their beauty and humanity,” he says, “the lasting quality of ‘The Traveller’ and ‘The Deserted Village’ is seriously prejudiced by his half-way attitude between the poetry of convention and the poetry of nature—between the gradus epithet of Pope and the direct vocabulary of Wordsworth.”[78] Thus when we read such lines as
The slow canal, the yellow-blossomed vale,
The willow-tufted bank, the gliding sail
(“Traveller,” ll. 293-4)
we feel that Goldsmith too has been writing with his eye on the object, and even in such a line as
The breezy covert of the warbling grove
(Ibid., 360)
there is a freshness of description that compensates for the use of the hackneyed warbling grove. On the other hand, there are in both pieces passages which it is difficult not to regard as purely conventional in their language. Thus in “The Traveller,” the diction, if not entirely of the stock type, is not far from it:
Ye glittering towns, with wealth and splendour crowned