His thoughts grew weak, drowsy, and

lamie

Of their intelligence.

XXII

To Peter's view, all seemed one hue;
He was no whig, he was no tory;
No Deist and no Christian he ;-
He got so subtle, that to be
Nothing, was all his glory.

XXIII

One single point in his belief

From his organisation sprung, The heart-enrooted faith, the chief Ear in his doctrines' blighted sheaf, That "happiness is wrong;"

XXIV

So thought Calvin and Dominic;

So think their fierce successors, who Even now would neither stint nor stick Our flesh from off our bones to pick, If they might "do their do."

XXV

His morals thus were undermined:-
The old Peter-the hard, old Potter
Was born anew within his mind;
He grew dull, harsh, sly, unrefined,
As when he tramped beside the Otter.1

XXVI

In the death hues of agony

Lambently flashing from a fish,
Now Peter felt amused to see
Shades like a rainbow's rise and flee,

Mixed with a certain hungry wish.2 1 A famous river in the new Atlantis of the Dynastophylic Pantisocratists.

2 See the description of the beautiful colours produced during the agonising death of a number of trout, in the fourth part of a long poem in blank verse, published within a few years. That

poem contains curious evidence of the gradual hardening of a strong but circumscribed sensibility, of the perversion of a penetrating but panic-stricken understanding. The author might have derived a lesson which he had probably forgotten from these sweet and sublime

verses.

"This lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide,

Taught both by what she shows and what conceals,
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."

1 Nature.

XXVII

So in his Country's dying face
He looked-and lovely as she lay,
Seeking in vain his last embrace,
Wailing her own abandoned case,
With hardened sneer he turned away:

XXVIII

And coolly to his own soul said;—
"Do you not think that we might
make

A poem on her when she's dead :—
Or, no-a thought is in my head-

Her shroud for a new sheet I'll take.

XXIX

"My wife wants one.-Let who will bury

This mangled corpse! And I and

you,

My dearest Soul, will then make merry, As the Prince Regent did with Sherry,Ay-and at last desert me too."

XXX

And so his Soul would not be gay,

But moaned within him; like a fawn Moaning within a cave, it lay Wounded and wasting, day by day, Till all its life of life was gone.

XXXI

As troubled skies stain waters clear,

The storm in Peter's heart and mind Now made his verses dark and queer: They were the ghosts of what they were, Shaking dim grave - clothes in the wind.

XXXII

For he now raved enormous folly,

Of Baptisms, Sunday - schools, and
Graves,

'Twould make George Colman melancholy,

To have heard him, like a male Molly, Chaunting those stupid staves.

These words exchanged, the news sent off

1 It is curious to observe how often extremes meet. Cobbett and Peter use the same language for a different purpose: Peter is indeed a sort of metrical Cobbett. Cobbett is, however, more mischievous than Peter, because he pollutes a holy and now unconquerable cause with the principles of legitimate murder; whilst the other only makes a bad one ridiculous and odious.

If either Peter or Cobbett should see this note, each will feel more indignation at being compared to the other than at any censure implied in the moral perversion laid to their charge.

XVIII

His servant-maids and dogs grew dull;
His kitten late a sportive elf,
The woods and lakes, so beautiful,
Of dim stupidity were full,

All grew dull as Peter's self.

XIX

The earth under his feet-the springs,
Which lived within it a quick life,
The air, the winds of many wings,
That fan it with new murmurings,
Were dead to their harmonious strife,

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

Stupidly yawned upon the other: No jack-ass brayed; no little cur Cocked up his ears;-no man would

stir

To save a dying mother.

XXII

Yet all from that charmed district went
But some half-idiot and half-knave,
Who rather than pay any rent,
Would live with marvellous content,
Over his father's grave.

XXIII

No bailiff dared within that space,
For fear of the dull charm, to enter;
A man would bear upon his face,
For fifteen months in any case,
The yawn of such a venture.

XXIV

Seven miles above-below-aroundThis pest of dulness holds its sway;

A ghastly life without a sound;
To Peter's soul the spell is bound-
How should it ever pass away?

NOTE ON PETER BELL THE
THIRD, BY MRS. SHELLEY

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. 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.

His

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

On Freedom's hearth, grew dim with Empire :

With thumbscrews, wheels, with tooth and spike and jag,

Which fishers found under the utmost crag

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.

isles,

wist,

make

Bent with sublime Archimedean art
To breathe a soul into the iron heart
Of some machine portentous, or strange
gin,

Which by the force of figured spells might win

Its way over the sea, and sport therein; For round the walls are hung dread engines, such

he take

Such shapes of unintelligible brass,
Or heap himself in such a horrid mass
Of tin and iron not to be understood;
And forms of unimaginable wood,
To puzzle Tubal Cain and all his
brood:

Great screws, and cones, and wheels, and grooved blocks,

clutch

Ixion or the Titan :-or the quick

Wit of that man of God, St. Dominic,

shocks

Of wave and wind and time.-Upon

the table