may be witnessed any day now in Italy. De Amicis, the Italian writer, in a book called On the Ocean, has an excellent and moving account of the departure of poor emigrants from their native land and of the terrors and joys of a sea-voyage to their new homes. 395, etc. This vision of "the rural virtues" leaving the land as the poor emigrants had done, presents in imaginative form the national catastrophe which Goldsmith has had in view throughout. We love best to linger on the portraits of the Parson and the Schoolmaster and the graceful descriptions of the happy village. But the poet wrote with serious purpose, using the fate of his village to illustrate what he conceived to be a great and threatening evil. This concluding section combines his intellectual conviction with his poetic instinct and is a fitting termination to both strains in the poem. 410, etc. Goldsmith only mentions the other departing Virtues : but he gives ten charming lines to Poetry. He was more intimate perhaps with her than with the others. Do you approve of having Poetry put among the rural virtues? Does she really flee the land given over to luxury? 418. Torno is a river dividing Sweden from Russia and falling into the Gulf of Bothnia. Pambamarca is a mountain near Quito. Goldsmith wanted a Northern and a Southern name. 423. Aid slighted truth with thy persuasive strain: Goldsmith's idea of the function of poetry may seem didactic. But it was shared by Shelley, who wrote in A Defense of Poetry, "The great instru ment of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause." 427. That trade's proud empire, etc.: Dr. Johnson told Boswell that he had written the last four lines of The Deserted Village. We might not have suspected this from internal evidence, but tue stately lines are characteristic of Johnson. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 1772-1834. 1. The output of Coleridge by which he lives as a poet is probably less than that of any other English poet of the first order except Gray. But there is this difference; one can ascribe the comparative sterility of Gray's genius to the "spiritual East Wind" which during his life-time blighted all free imaginative growth; while Coleridge lived at the height of the Romantic Revival, at a time when the sweetest and most life-giving winds of heaven were blowing on the dead bones of English poetry. The age of Pope was behind him, with its artificial cleverness; so was the age of Goldsmith and Gray, with its pathetic stir of feeling and fancy half-stifled by the surrounding atmosphere. Coleridge himself had a large share in experiencing and extending the new life of his age; and we must find explanation for the paucity of his product, not in any lack of poetic power or sensitiveness, nor in any surrounding circumstance, but solely in moral and personal weakness. That weakness we dare not ignore, yet, reading the exquisite poetry which he gave us at his best, gratitude must be our chief instinct toward him; nor may we forget that in addition to poems which most completely convey the spell of beauty and wonder in which the romantic temper delights, Coleridge through his prose writings |