XVIII His servant-maids and dogs grew dull; All grew dull as Peter's self. XIX The earth under his feet-the springs, XX The birds and beasts within the wood, The insects, and each creeping thing, Were now a silent multitude; Love's work was left unwrought- -no brood Near Peter's house took wing. XXI And every neighbouring cottager stir To save a dying mother. XXII Yet all from that charmed district went XXIII No bailiff dared within that space, XXIV Seven miles above-below-around--This pest of dulness holds its sway; A ghastly life without a sound; NOTE ON PETER BELL THE IN this new edition I have added Peter Bell the Third. A critique on Wordsworth's Peter Bell reached us at Leghorn, which amused Shelley exceedingly, and suggested this poem. I need scarcely observe that nothing personal to the author of Peter Bell is intended in this poem. No man ever admired Wordsworth's poetry more;-he read it perpetually, and taught others to appreciate its beauties. This poem is, like all others written by Shelley, ideal. He conceived the idealism of a poet-a man of lofty and creative genius-quitting the glorious calling of discovering and announcing the beautiful and good, to support and propagate ignorant prejudices and pernicious errors; imparting to the unenlightened, not that ardour for truth and spirit of toleration which Shelley looked on as the sources of the moral improvement and happiness of mankind, but false and injurious opinions, that evil was good, and that ignorance and force were the best allies of purity and virtue. His idea was that a man gifted, even as transcendently as the author of Peter Bell, with the highest qualities of genius, must, if he fostered such errors, be infected with dulness. This poem was written as a warning-not as a narration of the reality. He was unacquainted personally with Wordsworth, or with Coleridge (to whom he alludes in the fifth part of the poem), and therefore, I repeat, his poem is purely ideal; it contains something of criticism on the compositions of those great poets, but nothing injurious to the men themselves. No poem contains more of Shelley's peculiar views with regard to the errors into which many of the wisest have fallen, and the pernicious effects of certain opinions on society. Much of it is beautifully written: and, though, like the burlesque drama of Swellfoot, it must be In poet's tower, cellar, or barn, or tree; The silk-worm in the dark green mulberry leaves His winding sheet and cradle ever weaves; On Freedom's hearth, grew dim with With thumbscrews, wheels, with tooth Which fishers found under the utmost crag So I, a thing whom moralists call worm, From the fine threads of rare and subtle And feed it with the asphodels of fame, Which in those hearts which must remember me Grow, making love an immortality. Magical forms the brick floor overspread, Whoever should behold me now, I Proteus transformed to metal did not Would think I were a mighty mechanist, More figures, or more strange; nor did Bent with sublime Archimedean art he take Such shapes of unintelligible brass, Which by the force of figured spells And forms of unimaginable wood, might win Its way over the sea, and sport therein; For round the walls are hung dread engines, such To puzzle Tubal Cain and all his brood: Great screws, and cones, and wheels, and grooved blocks, As Vulcan never wrought for Jove to The Ixion or the Titan :-or the quick elements of what will stand the shocks Of wave and wind and time.-Upon the table am able More knacks and quips there be than I With ink in it;—a china cup that was To catalogise in this verse of mine:A pretty bowl of wood—not full of wine, But quicksilver; that dew which the gnomes drink When at their subterranean toil they swink, Pledging the demons of the earthquake, who Reply to them in lava-cry halloo ! The liquor doctors rail at—and which I Will quaff in spite of them—and when we die We'll toss up who died first of drinking tea, And cry out,-heads or tails? where'er we be. And call out to the cities o'er their Near that a dusty paint box, some odd Roofs, towers, and shrines, the dying A half-burnt match, an ivory block, This quicksilver no gnome has drunk-Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray within The walnut bowl it lies, veinèd and thin, In colour like the wake of light that stains Of figures, disentangle them who may. Baron de Tott's Memoirs beside them lie, And some odd volumes of old chemistry. Near those a most inexplicable thing, The Tuscan deep, when from the moist With lead in the middle-I'm conjectur Is gathering on the mountains, like a We watched the ocean and the sky cloak together, Folded athwart their shoulders broad Under the roof of blue Italian weather; How I ran home through last year's and bare; The ripe corn under the undulating air The murmur of the awakening sea doth The empty pauses of the blast ;-the hill thunder-storm, And felt the transverse lightning linger warm Upon my cheek-and how we often made Feasts for each other, where good will outweighed The frugal luxury of our country cheer, Looks hoary through the white electric As well it might, were it less firm and rain, clear And from the glens beyond, in sullen Than ours must ever be;-and how we strain, The interrupted thunder howls; above One chasm of heaven smiles, like the eye of Love spun A shroud of talk to hide us from the sun On the unquiet world; while such Of all we would believe, and sadly blame things are, How could one worth your friendship heed the war Of worms? the shriek of the world's carrion jays, The mise purposes and thoughts of men whose eyes Their censure, or their wonder, or their Were closed in distant years;—or widely praise? guess The issue of the earth's great business, You are not here! the quaint witch When we shall be as we no longer are-Like babbling gossips safe, who hear the war Memory sees In vacant chairs, your absent images, And points where once you sat, and now Of winds, and sigh, but tremble not; And winged with thoughts of truth and Flags wearily through darkness and despair majesty, Flits round the tyrant's sceptre like a A cloud-encircled meteor of the air, A hooded eagle among blinking owls.You will see Hunt-one of those happy souls cloud, And bursts the peopled prisons, and cries aloud, "My name is Legion!"-that majestic tongue Which Calderon over the desert flung Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom This world would smell like what it is -a tomb; Of ages and of nations; and which found is, what others seem; his room no doubt Startled oblivion;-thou wert then to Is still adorned by many a cast from Though fallen—and fallen on evil times Among the spirits of our age and land, Shout, With graceful flowers tastefully placed about; And coronals of bay from ribbons hung, And brighter wreaths in neat disorder flung; The gifts of the most learn'd among some dozens Of female friends, sisters-in-law, and And there is he with his eternal puns, like duns Thundering for money at a poet's door; Things wiser than were ever read in Except in Shakespeare's wisest tender ness. You will see Hogg,-and I cannot express His virtues, though I know that they are great, Because he locks, then barricades the gate Within which they inhabit;—of his wit And wisdom, you'll cry out when you are bit. You will see Coleridge-he who sits He is a pearl within an oyster shell, |