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 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 Ye fields, where summer spreads profusion round Ye lakes, whose vessels catch the busy gale Ye bending swains, that dress the flowery vale, and so on for another dozen lines.[79] Only the slightest traces, however, of this mechanical word-painting appear in “The Deserted Village,” almost the only example of the stereotyped phrase being in the line These simple blessings of _the lowly train_ (l. 252).