Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock
Page 145
And views with careless and disdainful eye
The humble and the poor, he shrinks in vain
From anxious thoughts, that teach his sickening heart,
That he is like the beings he contemns,
The creature of an hour; that when a few,
Few years have past, that little spot of earth,
That dark and narrow bed, which all must press,
Will level all distinction. Then he bids
The marble structure rise, to guard awhile,
A little while, his fading memory.
Thou lord of thousands! Time is lord of thee:
Thy wealth, thy glory, and thy name are his.
And may protract the blow, but cannot bar
His certain course, nor shield his destined prey.
Tho wind and rain assail thy sumptuous domes:
They sink, and are forgotten. All that is
Must one day cease to be. The chiefs and kings,
That awe the nations with their pomp and power,
Shall slumber with the chiefs and kings of old:
And Time shall leave no monumental stone,
To tell the spot of their eternal rest.
CHORAL ODE.
[Date unknown.]
From SOPHOCLES: Œdipus at Colonas.
ALAS! that thirst of wealth and power
Should pass the bounds by wisdom laid,
And shun contentment’s mountain-bower,
To chase a false and fleeting shade!
The torrid orb of summer shrouds
Its head in darker, stormier clouds
Than quenched its vernal glow;
And streams, that meet the expanding sea,
Resign the peace and purity
That marked their infant flow.
Go seek what joys, serene and deep,
The paths of wealth and power supply!
The eyes no balmy slumbers steep:
The lips own no satiety,
Till, where unpitying Pluto dwells,
And where the turbid Styx impels
Its circling waves along,
The pale ghost treads the flowerless shore,
And hears the unblest sisters pour
Their loveless, lyreless song.
Man’s happiest lot is not to be:
And, when we tread life’s thorny steep,
Most blest are they, who, earliest free,
Descend to death’s eternal sleep.
Prom wisdom far, and peace, and truth,
Imprudence leads the steps of youth,
Where ceaseless evils spring:
Toil, frantic passion, deadly strife,
Revenge, and murder’s secret knife,
And envy’s scorpion sting.
Age comes, unloved, unsocial age,
Exposed to fate’s severest shock,
As to the ocean-tempest’s rage
The bleak and billow-beaten rock.
There ills on ills commingling press,
Morose, unjoying helplessness,
And pain, and slow disease:
As, when the storm of winter raves,
The wild winds rush from all their caves,
To swell the northern seas.
OH, NOSE OF WAX! TRUE SYMBOL OF THE MIND.
[Date unknown.]
OH, nose of wax! true symbol of the mind
Which fate and fortune mould in all mankind
(Even as the hand moulds thee) to foul or fair —
Thee good John Bull for his device shall bear,
While Sawney Scot the ductile mass shall mould,
Bestowing paper and receiving gold.
Thy image shrined in studious state severe,
Shall grace the pile which Brougham and Campbell rear:
Thy name to those scholastic bowers shall pass
And rival Oxford’s ancient nose of brass.
A GOODBYE BALLADE OF LITTLE JOHN.
SHEWINGE HOW HE RAYSED A DYVELL, AND COULDE NOTTE LAYE HYMME.
[Date unknown.]
FYTTE THE FIRST.
LITTLE John he sat in a lonely hall,
Mid spoils of the Church of old:
And he saw a shadowing on the wall,
That made his blood run cold.
He saw the dawn of a coming day,
Dim-glimmering through the gloom:
He saw the coronet pass away
From the ancient halls where it then held sway,
And the mitre it’s place resume.
He saw, the while, through the holy pile
The incense vapour spread;
He saw the poor, at the Abbey door,
Receiving their daily bread.
He saw on the wall the shadows cast
Of sacred sisters three:
He blessed them not, as they flitted past:
But above them all he hated the last,
For that was Charitie,
Now down from its shelf a book he bore,
And characters he drew,
And a spell he muttered o’er and o’er,
Till before him cleft was the marble floor,
And a murky fiend came through.
“Now take thee a torch in thy red right hand,”
Little John to the fiend he saith:
“And let it serve as a signal brand,
To rouse the rabble, throughout the land,
Against the Catholic Faith.”
Straight through the porch, with brandished torch,.
The fiend went joyously out:
And a posse of parsons, established by law,
Sprang up, when the lurid flame they saw,
To head the rabble rout.
And braw Scots Presbyters nimbly sped
In the train of the muckle black de’il;
And, as the wild infection spread,
The Protestant hydra’s every head,
Sent forth a yell of zeal.
And pell-mell went all forms of dissent, ‘
Each beating its scriptural drum;
Wesleyans and Whitfieldites followed as friends,.
And whatever in onion Iarian ends,
Et omne quod exit in hum.
And in bonfires burned ten thousand Guys,
With caricatures of the pious and wise,
‘Mid shouts of goblin glee,
And such a clamour rent the skies,
That all buried lunatics seemed to rise,
And hold a Jubilee.
FYTTE THE SECOND.
The devil gave the rabble scope
And they left him not in the lurch:
But they went beyond the summoned hope;
For they quickly got tired of bawling “No Pope!”
And bellowed, “No State Church!”
“Ho!” quoth Little John, “this must not be:
The devil leads all amiss:
He works for himself, and not for me:
And straightway back I’ll bid him flee
To the bottomless abyss.”
Again he took down his book from the wall,
And pondered words of might:
He muttered a speech, and he scribbled a scrawl:
But the only answer to his call
Was a glimpse, at the uttermost end of the hall,
Of the devil taking a sight.
And louder and louder grew the clang
As the rabble raged without:
The door was beaten with many a bang;
And the vaulted roof re-echoing rang
To the tumult and the shout.
The fiendish shade, on the wall portrayed,
Threw somersaults fast and free,
And flourished his tail like a brandished flail,
As busy as if it were blowing a gale,
And his task were on the sea.
And up he toss’t his huge pitchfork,
As visioned shrines uprose;
And right and left he went to work,
Till full over Durham, and Oxford, and York,
> He stood with a menacing pose.
The rabble roar was hushed awhile,
As the hurricane rests in its sweep;
And all throughout the ample pile
Reigned silence dread and deep.
Then a thrilling voice cried: “Little John,
A little spell will do,
When there is mischief to be dope,
To raise me up and set me on;
For I, of my own free will, am won
To carry such spiritings through.
“But when I am riding the tempest’s wing,
And towers and spires have blazed,
’Tis no small conjuror’s art to sing,
Or say, a spell to check the swing
Of the demons he has raised.”
FAREWELL TO MEIRION.
[No date.]
MEIRION, farewell! thy sylvan shades,
Thy mossy rocks and bright cascades,
Thy tangled glens and dingles wild,
Might well detain the Muses’ child.
But can the son of science find,
In thy fair realm, one kindred mind,
One soul sublime, by feeling taught,
To wake the genuine pulse of thought,
One heart by nature formed to prove
True friendship and unvarying love!
No — Bacchus reels through all thy fields,
Her brand fanatic frenzy wields,
And ignorance with falsehood dwells,
And folly shakes her jingling bells.
—
Meirion, farewell — and ne’er again
My steps shall press thy mountain reign,
Nor long on thee my memory rest,
Fair as thou art — unloved, unblessed.
And ne’er may parting stranger’s hand
Wave a fond blessing on thy land.
Long as disgusted virtue flies
From folly, drunkenness, and lies:
Long as insulted science shuns
The steps of thy degraded sons;
Long as the northern tempest roars
Found their inhospitable doors.
OH BLEST ARE THEY, AND THEY ALONE.
[No date.]
OH blest are they, and they alone,
To fame to wealth to power unknown;
Whose lives in one perpetual tenor glide,
Nor feel one influence of malignant fate:
For when the gods on mortals frown
They pour no single vengeance down,
But scatter ruin vast and wide
On all the race they hate.
Then ill on ill succeeding still,
With unrelaxing fury pours,
As wave on wave the breakers rave
Tumultuous on the wreck-strown shores,
When northern tempests sweep
The wild and wintry deep,
Uprending from its depths the sable sand,
Which blackening eddies whirl,
And crested surges hurl
Against the rocky bulwarks of the land,
While to the tumult, deepening round,
The repercussive caves resound.
In solitary pride,
By Dirce’s murmuring side,
The giant oak has stretched its ample shade,
And waved its tresses of imperial might;
Now low in dust its blackened boughs are laid
Its dark root withers in the depth of night.
Nor hoarded gold, nor pomp of martial power
Can check necessity’s supreme control,
That cleaves unerringly the rock-built tower,
And whelms the flying bark where shoreless oceans roll.
AELIA LAELIA CRISPIS.
AN ATTEMPT TO SOLVE THE ÆNIGMA.
MANY LEARNED MEN have offered explanations of this ænigma. None of these explanations have been found satisfactory. If that which I have to offer should meet with acceptance, it will appear that my erudite predecessors have overlooked the obvious in seeking for the recondite.
About two hundred years ago, a marble was found near Bologna, with the following inscription: —
I believe this ænigma to consist entirely in the contrast, between the general and particular consideration of the human body, and its accidents of death and burial. Abstracting from it all but what is common to all human bodies, it has neither age nor sex; it has no morals, good’ or bad; it dies from no specific cause: lies in no specific place: is the subject of neither joy nor grief to the survivor, who superintends its funeral: has no specific monument erected over it; is, in short, the abstraction contemplated in the one formula: “Man that is born of a woman;” which the priest pronounces equally over the new-born babe, the maturer man or woman, and the oldest of the old.
But considered in particular, that is, distinctively and individually, we see, in succession, man and woman, young and old, good and bad; we see some buried in earth, some in sea, some in polar ice, some in mountain snow. We see a funeral superintended, here by one who rejoices, there by one who mourns; we see tombs of every variety of form. The abstract superintendent of a funeral, abstractedly interring an abstract body, does not know to whom he raises the abstract monument, nor what is its form; but the particular superintendent of a particular funeral knows what the particular monument is, and to whose memory it is raised.
So far the inscription on the marble found at Bologna. Another copy, in an ancient MS. at Milan, adds three lines, which do not appear to me to belong to the original inscription: —
Hoc est sepulchrum, cadaver intus non habens:
Hoc est cadaver, sepulchrum extra non habens:
Sed idem cadaver est et sepulchrum sibi.
This is a sepulchre, not having a corpse within:
This is a corpse, not having a sepulchre without:
But the same is to itself both corpse and sepulchre.
These lines are the translation of a Greek epigram on Niobe: to whom they are strictly appropriate, and to whom I am contented to leave them: —
There is another consideration, which makes the Milanese manuscript of more questionable authority than the Bolognese marble. The marble has the superscription, D.M. Diis Manibus: To the Gods of the Dead: which is suitable to the dead in all points of view, general and particular. The MS. has Am. P. P. D., Amicus Propria Pecunia Dicavit: A friend has dedicated this monument at his own expense: which is suitable only to a particular tomb, and a definite relation between the dead and the living.
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
A BORDER BALLAD.
A FRAGMENT.
A GOODBYE BALLADE OF LITTLE JOHN.
A MOOD OF MY OWN MIND
A WHITEBAIT DINNER AT LOVEGROVE’S AT BLACKWALL, JULY, 1851.
AELIA LAELIA CRISPIS.
AL MIO PRIMIERO AMORE.
AMARILLIS.
BYP AND NOP.
CALEDONIAN WAR WHOOP.
CASTLES IN THE AIR.
CHORAL ODE TO LOVE.
CHORAL ODE.
CHORUS OF BUBBLE BUYERS.
CHORUS OF NORTHUMBRIANS ON THE PROHIBITION OF SCOTCH ONE-POUND NOTES IN ENGLAND.
CLONAR AND TLAMIN.
CONNUBIAL EQUALITY.
DREAMS.
ELLEN.
EPILOGUE TO ‘GUARDIANS’
FAREWELL TO MATILDA.
FAREWELL TO MEIRION.
FIOLFAR, KING OF NORWAY.
FISH FEAST.
FOLDATH IN THE CAVERN OF MOMA.
HENRIETTE.
I DUG, BENEATH THE CYPRESS SHADE.
IN REMEMBRANCE OF FORTY-FOUR YEARS AGO.
INSCRIPTION FOR A MOUNTAIN-DELL.
LAMENT OF SCOTCH ECONOMISTS ON THE EXTINCTION OF THE ONE-POUND NOTES.
LEVI MOSES.
LINES ON THE DEATH OF JULIA, LORD BROUGHTON’S ELDEST DAUGHTER, 1849.
LINES TO A FAVOURITE LAUREL IN THE GARDEN AT ANKERWYKE COTTAGE.
LOVE AND THE FLIMSIES.
MARGERY DAW.
MARIA’S
RETURN TO HER NATIVE COTTAGE.
MIDNIGHT.
MIRA.
NECESSITY.
NEWARK ABBEY, ON THE WEY, NEAR CHERTSEY, SURREY.
OH BLEST ARE THEY, AND THEY ALONE.
OH, NOSE OF WAX! TRUE SYMBOL OF THE MIND.
ON THE DEATH OF CHARLES PEMBROKE, ESQ.
PALMYRA.
PAN IN TOWN.
PAPER MONEY LYRICS.
PHŒDRA AND NURSE.
PINDAR ON THE ECLIPSE OF THE SUN.
POLYXENA TO ULYSSES.
PROLOGUE TO ‘GUARDIANS’
PROŒMIUM OF AN EPIC
REMEMBER ME.
RHODODAPHNE.
RICH AND POOR.
ROMANCE.
SIR HORNBOOK.
SIR PROTEUS.
SLENDER’S LOVE-ELEGY.
ST. PETER OF SCOTLAND.
STANZAS, WRITTEN AT SEA.
STANZAS.
THE DEATH OF ŒDIPUS.
THE FATE OF A BROOM.
THE GENIUS OF THE THAMES.
THE GENIUS OF THE THAMES. PART I
THE GENIUS OF THE THAMES. PART I.
THE GENIUS OF THE THAMES. PART II
THE GENIUS OF THE THAMES. PART II.
THE LEGEND OF MANOR HALL.
THE LORD’S PRAYER PARAPHRASED.
THE MONKS OF ST. MARK.
THE OLD MAN’S COMPLAINT.
THE RAINBOW.
THE ROUND TABLE
THE ROUND TABLE; OR KING ARTHUR’S FEAST.
THE THREE LITTLE MEN.
THE VIGILS OF FANCY.
THE VISIONS OF LOVE.
THE WISE MEN OF GOTHAM.
TIME.
TO A YOUNG LADY, NETTING.
TO MRS. DE ST. CROIX, ON HER RECOVERY.
TRANSLATION FROM THE ITALIAN OF GUACINI.
YE KITE-FLYERS OF SCOTLAND.
YOUTH AND AGE.
The Non-Fiction
In 1823, Peacock acquired a country residence in Lower Halliford near Shepperton, where he lived until his death in 1866.
The Four Ages of Poetry
Qui inter haec nutriuntur non magis sapere possunt,
quam bene olere qui in culina habitant. PETRONIUS. 1
POETRY, like the world, may be said to have four ages, but in a different order: the first age of poetry being the age of iron; the second, of gold; the third, of silver; and the fourth, of brass.
The first, or iron age of poetry, is that in which rude bards celebrate in rough numbers the exploits of ruder chiefs, in days when every man is a warrior, and when the great practical maxim of every form of society, “to keep what we have and to catch what we can,” is not yet disguised under names of justice and forms of law, but is the naked motto of the naked sword, which is the only judge and jury in every question of meum and tuum. In these days, the only three trades flourishing (besides that of priest which flourishes always) are those of king, thief, and beggar: the beggar being for the most part a king deject, and the thief a king expectant. The first question asked of a stranger is, whether he is a beggar or a thief: 2 the stranger, in reply, usually assumes the first, and awaits a convenient opportunity to prove his claim to the second appellation.