The traveller Author:Oliver Goldsmith Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DEDICATION. TO THE REV. HENRY GOLDSMITH1). Dear Sir, I am sensible that the friendship between us can acquire no new force from the ceremonies of a dedi... more »cation; and perhaps it demands an excuse thus to preftx your name to my attempts, which you decline giving with your own. Rut as a part of this poem was formerly written to you from Switzerland, the whole can now, with propriety, be only inscribed to you. It will also throw a light upon many parts of it when the reader understands that it is addressed to a man who, despising fame and fortune, has retired early to happiness and obscurity, with an income of forty pounds a year. 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 labourers are but few; while you have left the field of ambition, where the labourers are many, and the harvest not worth carrying away. But of all kinds of ambition, what from the refinement of the times, from different systems of criticism, and from the divisions of party, that which pursues poetical fame is the wildest. Poetry makes a principal amusement among uupolished nations; but in a country verging to the extremes of refinement, 1) Henry Goldsmith, ein sechs Jahre iilterer Bruder des Dich- ters, war protestantischer Geistlicher und verwaltete bis zu seinem Tode im Mai 1768 die sehr gering dotierte Pfarrstelle seines Heimat- dorfes Pallas in der irischen Grafschaft Longford, die der Vater friiher 12 Jahre hindurch, von 1718—1730, innegehaht hatte. In der Dedi- kation zu 'The Deserted Village' 1770 aul'sert sich der Dichter iiber die herzliche Gesinnung, die er gegen seinen alteren Bruder hegte, mit folgenden Worten: ,,The only dedication I ever made was to my brother, because I loved him better ...« less