In poetry, if Goldsmith did not write much, it was for lack of opportunity. What he did write is good, nearly all of it. The philosophy of 'The Traveller' (1764) and the political economy of 'The Deserted Village' (1770) may be dubious, but the poetry is true. 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, [Pg 6505] 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 breaks away from Pope. His larger movement, his easier modulation, his richer tone, his rarer epithet and epigram, his metaphor "glowing from the heart," mark the defection from the poetry of cold conceit.