O, blest retirement! friend to life's decline - How blest is he who crowns, in shades like these, A youth of labor with an age of ease!

These lines come from Oliver Goldsmith’s long poem *The Deserted Village* (1770), a lament for the depopulation and moral dislocation of rural England amid economic change and enclosure. In the poem, Goldsmith contrasts the lost simplicity of village life with the pressures of wealth, urban ambition, and displacement. The speaker pauses to praise “retirement” in the older sense of withdrawal from public striving—an ideal of ending one’s days in quiet, pastoral seclusion. The sentiment reflects an 18th‑century moral commonplace: after a youth of honest work, the best “success” is a modest, peaceful old age rather than continued competition for status.

Goldsmith idealizes “retirement” as a humane reward for a life of labor: not idleness, but repose earned through effort. The “shades” suggest both literal trees and the figurative shelter of privacy, implying that dignity in old age depends on stability, community, and a landscape that can still sustain memory and belonging. In *The Deserted Village*, this praise is not merely personal; it is political and ethical. If economic forces strip rural people of home and livelihood, they also steal the possibility of such “age of ease.” The lines therefore function as both consolation and indictment: a vision of what a good society should allow its workers to attain.