OLIYEK GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES. [BOOK m.
1764. life, reflected from its calm still depths of philosophic con-
M~36. templation. Above all do we perceive that it is a poem
built upon nature; that it rests upon honest truth; that it
is not crying to the moon and the stars for impossible sym-
pathy, or dealing with other worlds, in fact or imagination,
than the writer has himself lived in and known. Wisely had
Goldsmith avoided, what, in the false-heroic versifiers of his
day, he had wittily condemned; the practice, even com-
moner since, of building up poetry on fantastic unreality, of
clothing it in harsh inversions of language, and of patching
it out with affectations of by-gone vivacity : " as if the more
" it was unlike prose, the more it would resemble poetry."
Making allowance for a brief expletive rarely scattered here
and there, his poetical language is unadorned yet rich, select
yet exquisitely plain, condensed yet home-felt and familiar.
He has considered, as he says himself of Parnell, " the
" language of poetry as the language of life, and conveys
" the warmest thoughts in the simplest expression."*
In what way the Traveller originated, the reader has seen.
It does not seem necessary to discuss in what precise pro-
portions its plan may have risen out of Addison's Letter from
Italy. Shaped in any respect by Thomson's remark, in one of
his letters to Bubb Dodington, " that a poetical landscape of
" countries, mixed with moral observations on their characters
" and people, would not be an ill-judged undertaking," it
certainly could not have been; t for that letter was not made
* Miscett. WorJcs, iii. 374.
f SirEgertonBrydges has pointed out some resemblance of topics, and a similar
union of contemplation and description, in a now forgotten poem of the hardly-
treated Blackmore; but there is nothing in the latter (the Nature of Man) to
suggest anything like imitation. The only couplet quoted having any resemblance
to the turns of Goldsmith's verse is where Blackmore says of the French,
"Still in extremes their passions they employ
Abject their grief, and insolent their joy."
But this was not peculiar to Blackmore. See Mitford's Life of Goldsmith, Ixi.