 | The Works of Thomas Love Peacock |  |
VI. [THE WORLD'S END]
Beyond old Homer's harp,
He little loved the barbarous clang
Of fiddle cracked and sharp:
Of Murray, Kerr, and Scott;
The sound went crashing through his head,
Like Van Tromp's famous shot,
By Hector thrown in sport,
Plumped headlong into Sheerness dock,
And battered down a fort.
And watched his time to fly;
And quickly spied, amid the tide,
A dolphin sailing by;—
And touched him in the fin,
And rose triumphant, on his back,
Through ocean's roaring din:
Still scraped his feudal jig;
Nor marked, as on his ballad went,
His bird had hopped the twig.
And landed was full soon,
Upon a wild and lonely shore,
Beneath the waning moon.
As black as hell itself,
And heard the breakers roar and rave,
A melancholy elf:
And advertise his mare,
In vain he struggled to be freed,
Such magic fixed him there.
“In vain my power you brave,
For here must end your earthly course,
And here's Oblivion's cave.
Descends the winding road,
By which forgotten minstrels press
To Pluto's drear abode.
And doubly kills the slain,
Where Y--- no more can nod or snore
In concert to the strain.
His serio-comic lay:
Here his grey Pegasus curvets,
Where none can hear him bray.
Since Jove hath cleft his deck:
Lo! on these rocks his tub is tost,
A shattered, shapeless wreck.
By ancient Dullness twined
With flowers that courtly influence breathe,
Thy votive temples bind.
The dull dwarf-laurel springs,
To bind the brows of venal men,
The tuneful slaves of kings.
Of thy poetic stamp,
That vent for gain the loyal strain,
Mid Stygian vapours damp,
While far below, where Lethe creeps,
The ghost of Freedom sits, and weeps
O'er Truth's extinguished lamp.”
L'ENVOY
Good reader! who have lost your timeIn listening to a noisy rhyme!
If catgut's din, and tramping pad,
Have not yet made completely mad
The little brains you ever had,—
Hear me, in friendly lay, expressing
A better than the Bellman's blessing:
That Nature may to you dispense
Just so much share of common sense,
As may distinguish smoke from fire,
A shrieking fiddle from a lyre,
And Phœbus, with his steed of air,
From poor old Poulter and his mare.
Our hero is not singular. The harp of Israel is exalted above the lyre of Greece by the poetical orthodoxy of the bards of the lakes:
Mæonium qui jam soliti contemnere carmen,Judaicos discunt numeros, servantque, coluntque,
Tradidit arcano quoscumque volumine Moses!
which accounts for the air of conscious superiority and dignified contempt they assume towards those perverted disciples of Homer and Sophocles, who are insensible to the primitive mellifluence of patriarchal modulation. It is not less creditable to the soundness of their theology than to the purity of their taste, that they herein differ toto cælo from the profane Frenchman, who concludes his poem with a treaty between the principal personages of the ancient and modern religions of Europe, by which it is stipulated, that the latter shall continue throned in glory on Mount Sinai, while the former shall retain the exclusive and undisturbed possession of Mount Parnassus.
See page 289, sqq.
Did human creature leave the shore.
But say what was it?—Thought of fear!
Well may ye tremble when ye hear!
A household tub, like one of those
Which women use to wash their clothes!
Wordsworth's Poems, vol. ii. p. 72.
The dwarf-laurel is a little stunted plant, growing in ditches and bogs, and very dissimilar to that Parnassian shrub, “which Dryden and diviner Spenser wore;” as in the Carmen Triumphale for the year 1814, mellifluously singeth the Protean bard, Robert Southey, Esquire, Poet-Laureate!!!
Χαιρε μοι, ω ΠΡΩΤΕΨ: ση δ' ουκετι τερψεαι οιοςΤεχνη : ΜΙΣΘΟΦΟΡΕΙ ΓΑΡ Ο ΠΟΙΚΙΛΟΜΟΡΦΟΣ ΑΠΟΛΛΩΝ
| The Works of Thomas Love Peacock | |