That which close students of the genius of Wordsworth will always turn to seek in Peter Bell is the sincere sentiment of nature and the studied simplicity of language which inspire its best stanzas. The narrative is clumsy in the extreme, and the attempts at wit and sarcasm ludicrous. Yet Peter Bell contains exquisite things. The Primrose stanza is known to every one; this is not so familiar:
The dragon's wing, the magic ring,
I shall not covet for my dower.
If I along that lowly way
With sympathetic heart may stray
And with a soul of power.
Nor this, with its excruciating simplicity, its descriptive accent of 1798:
_I see a blooming Wood-boy there,
And, if I had the power to say
How sorrowful the wanderer is,
Your heart would be as sad as his
Till you had kiss'd his tears away!
Holding a hawthorn branch in hand,
All bright with berries ripe and red;
Into the cavern's mouth he peeps—
Thence back into the moonlight creeps;
What seeks the boy?—the silent dead!_
It is when he wishes to describe how Peter Bell became aware of the dead body floating under the nose of the patient ass that Wordsworth loses himself in uncouth similes. Peter thinks it is the moon, then the reflection of a cloud, then a gallows, a coffin, a shroud, a stone idol, a ring of fairies, a fiend. Last of all the poet makes the Potter, who is gazing at the corpse, exclaim:
Is it a party in a parlour?
Cramm'd just as they on earth were cramm'd—
Some sipping punch, some sipping tea,
But, as you by their faces see,
All silent and all damned!
So deplorable is the waggishness of a person, however gifted, who has no sense of humour! This simile was too much for the gravity even of intimate friends like Southey and Lamb, and after the second edition it disappeared.
THE FANCY
THE FANCY: A Selection from the Poetical Remains of the late Peter Corcoran, of Gray's Inn, student at law. With a brief Memoir of his life. London: printed for Taylor & Hessey, Fleet Street. 1820.