Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,
Or by the lazy Scheldt, or wandering Po.

These lines come from Oliver Goldsmith’s long poem "The Traveller; or, A Prospect of Society" (1764), written after his years of travel on the Continent and published as he was establishing himself in London’s literary world. In the poem, Goldsmith surveys European nations and social systems from a reflective distance, contrasting public prosperity with private happiness. The quoted couplet occurs in a passage imagining the speaker’s own solitary wandering abroad—far from friends and home—along emblematic European rivers (the Scheldt in the Low Countries and the Po in Italy). The tone underscores the personal cost of displacement that shadows the poem’s broader social critique.

The couplet compresses a mood of exile: “remote” and “unfriended” stress social isolation, while “melancholy, slow” suggests both emotional heaviness and the dragging passage of time when one is cut off from familiar ties. The rivers function as geographic shorthand for foreign landscapes, but also as symbols of drifting and aimless movement—“lazy” and “wandering” mirroring the speaker’s own unsettled condition. In the larger argument of "The Traveller," such loneliness complicates any simple admiration of national wealth or political arrangements: a society may appear flourishing, yet the individual’s happiness can be fragile, contingent on belonging, friendship, and a sense of home.