Nor the coy maid, half willing to be prest, 150 Shall kiss the cup to pass it to the rest.

Yes! let the rich deride, the proud disdain,
These simple blessings of the lowly train;
To me more dear, congenial to my heart,
One native charm, than all the gloss of art.
255 Spontaneous joys, where nature has its play,
The soul adopts, and owns their first-born sway;
Lightly they frolic o'er the vacant mind,
Unenvied, unmolested, unconfin'd.

But the long pomp, the midnight masquerade,
960 With all the freaks of wanton wealth array'd,-
In these, ere triflers half their wish obtain,
The toiling pleasure sickens into pain;
And even while fashion's brightest arts decoy,
The heart, distrusting, ask if this be joy.

865 Ye friends to truth, ye statesmen, who survey
The rich man's joys increase, the poor's decay,
'Tis yours to judge how wide the limits stand
Between a splendid and a happy land.

Proud swells the tide with loads of freighted ore, 170 And shouting Folly hails them from her shore;

Hoards e'en beyond the miser's wish abound,
And rich men flock from all the world around.

250. To kiss the cup was to touch it with the lips before passing. Ben Jonson's well-known verses to Celia begin :

"Drink to me only with thine eyes,

And I will pledge with mine;

Or leave a kiss but in the cup,

And I'll not look for wine."

"There is a

268. Goldsmith says a similar thing in the Citizen of the World, when he makes the sententious remark: wide difference between a conquering and a flourishing empire."

Yet count our gains: this wealth is but a name, That leaves our useful products still the same. 275 Not so the loss. The man of wealth and pride Takes up a space that many poor supplied; Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds, Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds: The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth 284 Has robb'd the neighboring fields of half their growth;

His seat, where solitary sports are seen,
Indignant spurns the cottage from the green;
Around the world each needful product flies,
For all the luxuries the world supplies.
285 While thus the land, adorn'd for pleasure, all
In barren splendor feebly waits the fall.

As some fair female, unadorn'd and plain, Secure to please while youth confirms her reign, Slights every borrow'd charm that dress supplies, 290 Nor shares with art the triumph of her eyes;

But when those charms are past, for charms are frail,

When time advances, and when lovers fail,
She then shines forth, solicitous to bless,
In all the glaring impotence of dress:
295 Thus fares the land, by luxury betray'd,
In nature's simplest charms at first array'd;
But, verging to decline, its splendors rise,
Its vistas strike, its palaces surprise;

While, scourged by famine from the smiling land,
300 The mournful peasant leads his humble band;
And while he sinks, without one arm to save,
The country blooms- a garden and a grave.

287. The use of "female" for "woman was common as late as Walter Scott.

Where then, ah! where shall poverty reside, To 'scape the pressure of contiguous pride? 305 If to some common's fenceless limits stray'd, He drives his flock to pick the scanty blade, Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide, And even the bare-worn common is denied. If to the city sped, what waits him there? 310 To see profusion that he must not share; To see ten thousand baneful arts combin'd, To pamper luxury, and thin mankind; To see those joys the sons of pleasure know Extorted from his fellow-creature's woe. as Here, while the courtier glitters in brocade, There the pale artist plies the sickly trade; Here, while the proud their long-drawn pomps dis play,

There the black gibbet glooms beside the way. The dome where Pleasure holds her midnight reign, 320 Here, richly deck'd, admits the gorgeous train; Tumultuous grandeur crowds the blazing square, The rattling chariots clash, the torches glare. Sure scenes like these no troubles e'er annoy! Sure these denote one universal joy!

305. If to some common's fenceless limits [having] strayed. 309. If to the city [he has] sped.

316. Artist was applied to those engaged in the useful and mechanic arts in Goldsmith's time.

319. When Coleridge wrote,

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree,"

he, too, like Goldsmith, was using a word not in what we regard as its technical sense, but as expressing a certain splendor of building.

322. Even now in the thick November fogs of London, linkboys, or boys with torches, point the way. Before the introduc tion of street lamps, such aids were common whenever the gen try would move about after night-fall.

825 Are these thy serious thoughts? Ah! turn thine

eyes

Where the poor houseless shivering female lies.
She once, perhaps, in village plenty blest,
Has wept at tales of innocence distrest;
Her modest looks the cottage might adorn,
230 Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn ;
Now lost to all her friends, her virtue fled -

Near her betrayer's door she lays her head,

And, pinch'd with cold, and shrinking from the shower,

With heavy heart deplores that luckless hour,

335 When idly first, ambitious of the town,

She left her wheel, and robes of country brown.

Do thine, sweet Auburn, thine, the loveliest train, Do thy fair tribes participate her pain? Even now, perhaps, by cold and hunger led, 340 At proud men's doors they ask a little bread.

Ah, no! To distant climes, a dreary scene, Where half the convex world intrudes between, Through torrid tracts with fainting steps they go,

326. In his Citizen of the World Goldsmith has said: "These poor shivering females have once seen happier days, and been flattered into beauty. . . . Perhaps now lying at the doors of their betrayers, they sue to wretches whose hearts are insensible." 336. Her [spinning] wheel.

343-358. Goldsmith, like Englishmen of a later day, was a little hazy in his notion of what the wilderness of America contained. He wrote not long after Oglethorpe was giving relief to many poor and distressed debtors, by welcoming them to his colony of Georgia. The Altama is better known as the Altamaha, but a certain poetic liberty attaches to the description in general.

!

Where wild Altama murmurs to their woe.

245 Far different there from all that charm'd before,
The various terrors of that horrid shore:
Those blazing suns that dart a downward
And fiercely shed intolerable day;

ray,

Those matted woods where birds forget to sing, 15 But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling;

Those pois'nous fields with rank luxuriance crown'd, Where the dark scorpion gathers death around; Where at each step the stranger fears to wake The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake; 355 Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey And savage men more murderous still than they; While oft in whirls the mad tornado flies, Mingling the ravag'd landscape with the skies. Far different these from every former scene, 360 The cooling brook, the grassy-vested green, The breezy covert of the warbling grove, That only shelter'd thefts of harmless love.

Good Heaven! what sorrows gloom'd that part. ing day

That call'd them from their native walks away;

365 When the poor exiles, every pleasure past,

Hung round the bowers, and fondly look'd their last,

And took a long farewell, and wish'd in vain For seats like these beyond the western main; And, shuddering still to face the distant deep, 70 Return'd and wept, and still return'd to weep! The good old sire the first prepar❜d to go

368. It was a common phrase in the earlier colonial days to say of colonists that they "sate" in a particular region.