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412. solitary pride my pride when alone. Goldsmith liked to write but complained that he did not find it profitable. Cf. Introduction, p. xxii. He wrote to his brother in 1759:

verse,

Poetry is a much easier and more agreeable species of composition than prose, and could a man live by it, it were no unpleasant employment to be a poet.

418. Torno: the river Tornea or Torneo, between northern Sweden and Russia, flows into the Gulf of Bothnia. Goldsmith is referring to this rather than to Lake Tornea in northern Sweden. Le Curieux Antiquaire, ou Recueil, Geographique et Histoirique, par P. L. Berkenmeyer, Leyden, 1729, probably the Geographie Curieuse to which Goldsmith referred Reverend J. Granger for the solution of “Luke's iron crown,” The Traveller, 1. 436 (see Granger's Letters, 1805, p. 52), says (Chapter XIX, p. 594) concerning Torneo: "Torne, Torna, petite ville de la Bothnie, sur le bord Septentrional du Golfe de ce nom, à l'embouchure de la Torne..." It is more likely, however, that the name was suggested to Goldsmith by the operations of the French philosopher, M. de Maupertuis, in the Arctic regions. See his book, The Figure of the Earth, determined from Observations, made by Order of the French King at the Polar Circle, London, 1738. Tornea is often mentioned throughout the book, as in the table of contents, "Observations of Arcturus, and of the Pole star, at Tornea," 99 66 Height of the Pole at Tornea,” etc. — Pambamarca: one of the summits of the Andes near Quito in Ecuador. It is not entered in ordinary geographies. Goldsmith seems to select Tornea and Pambamarca as extremes, representing the Arctic and the equatorial regions. Undoubtedly he derived the suggestion of the name from A Voyage to South America, by Don George Juan and Don Antonio de Ulloa, trans., London, 1760. Cf. "Eastward it [the plain] is defended by the lofty Cordillera of Guamani and Pambamarca, and westward by that of Pinchincha” (p. 219). See also p. 229. Later in the book is described a signal erected on Pambamarca.

419. equinoctial fervours: torrid or equatorial heat. Another phrase in the characteristic eighteenth century poetic manner. Day and night are of about equal length when the sun crosses the equator, i.e. about March 21 and September 23.

422. Redress: make amends for.

425. of: construed with possest.

428. laboured mole: a pier or breakwater. The last four lines of the poem, as Boswell tells us, were written by Dr. Johnson (Boswell's Life, Chapter XV). They are in a stiffer manner than Goldsmith's.

NOTES ON THE TRAVELLER

A Prospect of Society, an early draft of The Traveller, was discovered by Bertram Dobell (1842-1914), the London bookseller, when he was looking over a package of pamphlets he had purchased. Mr. Dobell printed this early draft, which comprises 310 lines, together with the first edition of The Traveller, comprising 416 lines, in 1902. The number of lines in the ninth edition, the last published in the author's lifetime, was 438. The order of the passages in Mr. Dobell's early version is strangely confused and inconsecutive, and it remained for Mr. A. T. Quiller-Couch, in a review in the Daily News of March 31, to point out that the disorder is due to the fact that The Prospect of Society printed The Traveller backwards in fairly regular sections. Mr. QuillerCouch's explanation may be cited in his own words:

As Goldsmith finished writing out each page of his poem for press he laid it aside, on top of the page preceding – -as I am doing with the pages of this causerie; and, when all was done, he forgot - as I hope I shall not forget-to sort back the pages in reverse order. That is all; given a good stolid compositor with no desire but to do his duty with the manuscript as it reached him, you have what Mr. Dobell has recovered - —an immortal poem printed wrong end foremost page by page. And I call the blunder delightful, and, when you come to think of it, just the blunder so natural to Goldsmith as to be almost postulable.

DEDICATION

The bond between Goldsmith and his brother seems always to have been very close (cf. note on The Deserted Village, 1. 140). It was characteristic of Goldsmith, though not the part of worldly wisdom, for him to dedicate his poem to his brother, to whom he felt deeply attached. Others would have conformed to the usual practice of the time and selected some wealthy patron, in hope of reward of money or preferment.

Sir: such formality was customary between near relatives in the eighteenth century.

forty pounds a year: cf. The Deserted Village, l. 142.

pursues poetical fame: cf. The Deserted Village, ll. 407-414, and note. In the first edition the second paragraph read as follows:

I now perceive, my dear brother, the wisdom of your humble choice. You have entered upon a sacred office where the harvest is great, and the laborers are but few; while you have left the field of Ambition, where the laborers are many, and the harvest not worth carrying away. But of all kinds of ambition, as things are now circumstanced, perhaps that which pursues poetical fame is the wildest. What from the increased refinement of the times, from the diversity of judgments produced by opposing systems of criticism, and from the more prevalent divisions of opinion influenced by party, the strongest and happiest efforts can expect to please but in a very narrow circle. Though the poet were as sure of his aim as the imperial archer of antiquity, who boasted that he never missed the heart; yet would many of his shafts now fly at random, for the heart is too often in the wrong place.

blank verse: a few poems in Goldsmith's day varied from the heroic couplets of reigning vogue, and blank verse was soon to regain popularity. But Goldsmith was no admirer of it. In his Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning (Chapter IX) he speaks of it as “a deviation from common sense."

Pindaric ode this lyric form, an imitation, or pseudo-imitation, of the Greek odes of Pindar, had an interesting history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

alliterative care: Goldsmith uses alliteration occasionally (as in 1.416), but does not go out of his way to produce it.

half-witted thing: the reference seems to be to Charles Churchill, whose satirical verses, dealing with contemporary people and happenings, brought him great but short-lived popularity.

THE TRAVELLER

1. slow Boswell, the biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson, tells that Anthony Chamier, a member of the Literary Club, and undersecretary of Ireland, once asked Goldsmith what he meant by slow in this line. Did he mean tardiness of locomotion? Goldsmith, who, according to Boswell, "would say something without consideration," answered "yes." At this Johnson said, "No, sir: you do not mean tardiness of locomotion. You mean that sluggishness of mind which comes upon a man in solitude." Chamier believed then, said Johnson, "that I had written the line, as much as if he had seen me write it." Of the lines which Johnson really did contribute, however, this was not one. Cf. note on l. 420.

Slow is an especially effective word, in that it may have either meaning for the reader, or both. Slowness of movement indicates depression

of spirits, as briskness of movement indicates exhilaration. The line is telling, since it well strikes, at the opening, the personal note of regret and longing dominant in the whole. The poet is a wanderer in a strange land and feels his isolation.

2. or... or either . . . or; an old usage, now poetical only. - lazy Scheldt: the Scheldt (pronounced skelt) is a sluggish river flowing through France, Belgium, and the Netherlands to the North Sea. wandering Po: the Po rises in the Alps, flows southward through northern Italy, and empties by many mouths into the Adriatic.

3. Carinthian boor: Goldsmith visited Carinthia, a Province in southern Austria east of the Tirol, in 1755. His editor, Cunningham, wrote in 1853, "Carinthia still retains its character for inhospitality." Goldsmith was once turned out of a house there, when he had sought a night's shelter, according to his biographer Prior.

5. Campania: the Campagna, or undulating plain surrounding Rome; not the province Campania of south-central Italy. The Campagna is still an unhealthy region, and in Goldsmith's day was especially deserted and desolate.

6. expanding expanded in early editions.

7-10. Goldsmith's testimonies to his attachment to his brother, and to his feeling of homesickness, are many. Cf. A Citizen of the World, Letter III, where he uses the same metaphor: "By every remove I only drag a greater length of chain"; also Letter to Henry Goldsmith, in 1759. Cf. also note on 1. 140 in The Deserted Village.

13. guests: not the guests of The Deserted Village, ll. 149, 159, but the inmates of the household.

15. repair: betake themselves. Want and pain are personified abstractions, in the manner well liked in the eighteenth century. 17. In the first edition:

Blest be those feasts where mirth and peace abound.

22. This is the picture of generous hospitality so often drawn by Goldsmith. Cf. The Deserted Village, l. 142-162; also The Vicar of Wakefield, Chapters I, VI.

23. me: object of leads, 1. 29.

24. The prose order would be "spent in wandering and care.”

27. Cf. "A Letter from a Traveller," The Bee: "When will my restless disposition give me leave to enjoy the present hour? When at Lyons, I thought all happiness lay beyond the Alps; when in Italy, I found myself still in want of something and expected to leave solitude

behind me by going into Roumelia; and now you find me turning back, still expecting ease everywhere but where I am.”

The same metaphor is used in The Vicar of Wakefield, Chapter XXIX, "Death, the only friend of the wretched, for a little while mocks the weary traveller with the view, and like his horizon still flies before him." 30. And find: to before the infinitive omitted.

31-36. Some peak of the Alps, below which Italy, Switzerland, and France extend into the distance, inducing imaginative reflection. 32. sit me down: archaic reflexive use of personal pronoun.

33. Cf. The Deserted Village, 11. 189–192.

34. an: cf. notes on The Deserted Village, 11. 93 and 268. 36. humbler pride: cf. note on 1. 256.

38. The first edition read:

When thus Creation's charms around combine,
Amidst the store, 't were thankless to repine,

'T were affectation all and school-taught pride,

To spurn the splendid things by heaven supply'd.

41. school-taught pride: pride such as that taught in the school of the Stoic philosophers, who advocated nonsurrender to the feelings and the acceptance of all things with passive resignation.

42. These little things: those which "make each humble bosom vain." 45. ye glittering towns: apostrophe of this type, emphasized by parallelism, was much liked in eighteenth-century poetry. Cf. The Deserted Village, 11. 1-34, 75-82, 385-394, 407, etc.

1. 2.

48. swains: rustics or peasants. Cf. note on The Deserted Village, - dress: till, cultivate.

50. heir in full, "Inasmuch as I am Creation's heir." One early edition read, "Creation's tenant, all the world is mine."

57. prevails: gets the mastery. – sorrows: signs of sorrows, i.e. tears. 60. consigned: assigned, dedicated.

63. to find: dependent on direct, 1. 64.

69. line: old term for equator, as in The Ancient Mariner.

70. golden sands: some think that Goldsmith had the Gold Coast in mind. palmy: made from the sap of various kinds of palms.

75. ff: the first edition reads:

And yet perhaps, if states with states we scan,

Or estimate their bliss on Reason's plan,

Though patriots flatter and though fools contend,

We still shall find uncertainty suspend;

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