The English Village: A Literary Study, 1750-1850 |
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18th century agricultural appeared Auburn ballad Balwhidder Barnes beauty Burns character charm church common Corn Law cottage Cottagers of Glenburnie Cowper Crabbe Crabbe's Deserted Village Dorset Ebenezer Elliott eclogue Elliott enclosure England English peasant English village evidence fact farm farmer feeling field fortune George George Eliot Goldsmith happy human humble individual industrial interest John John Clare laborers land laws less literary living London matter ment Miss Mitford moral nature never novels parish parson pastoral Patrick Brontė peasantry picture poem poet poetic poetry political poor poverty Preface present prose realistic rural rustic says scenes Scott Scottish sentimental settlement laws Shepherd sketches Snaith Marsh Soame Jenyns social society spirit Squire story things Thomson tion toil town treatment truth verse village literature village poems virtues W. H. Hudson wealth whole Wordsworth write wrote young
Popular passages
Page 92 - And even the bare-worn common is denied. If to the city sped - what waits him there? To see profusion that he must not share...
Page 45 - Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life ; for there is in London all that life can afford.
Page 92 - Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn, Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn ; Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen, And desolation saddens all thy green: One only master grasps the whole domain, And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain...
Page 89 - It is made up of incongruous parts. The village in its happy days is a true English village. The village in its decay is an Irish village. The felicity and the misery which Goldsmith has brought close together belong to two different countries, and to two different stages in the progress of society. He 'had assuredly never seen in his native island such a rural paradise, such a seat of plenty, content, and tranquillity, as his Auburn.
Page 92 - 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 Has robbed the neighbouring fields of half their growth; His seat, where solitary sports are seen, Indignant spurns the cottage from the green...
Page 89 - A poet may easily be pardoned for reasoning ill; but he cannot be pardoned for describing ill , for observing the world in which he lives so carelessly that his portraits bear no resemblance to the originals , for exhibiting as copies from real life monstrous combinations of things which never were and never could be found together.
Page 94 - But when contending chiefs blockade the throne, Contracting regal power to stretch their own, When I behold a factious band agree To call it freedom when themselves are free ; Each wanton judge new penal statutes draw, Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law...
Page 180 - The time draws near the birth of Christ: The moon is hid; the night is still; The Christmas bells from hill to hill Answer each other in the mist. Four voices of four hamlets round, From far and near, on mead and moor, Swell out and fail, as if a door Were shut between me and the sound: Each voice four changes on the wind, That now dilate, and now decrease, Peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace, Peace and goodwill, to all mankind.
Page 59 - Or, frequent in the sounding hall, they wake The rural gambol. Rustic mirth goes round ; The simple joke that takes the shepherd's heart, Easily pleased ; the long loud laugh, sincere ; The kiss, snatched hasty from the side-long maid.
Page 136 - I already loved : — not verily For their own sakes, but for the fields and hills Where was their occupation and abode. And hence this Tale, while I was yet a Boy Careless of books, yet having felt the power Of Nature, by the gentle agency Of natural objects, led me on to feel For passions that were not my own, and think (At random and imperfectly indeed) On man, the heart of man, and human life.