All is colossal here; the gazer seems Lost, overwhelmed, beneath yon wondrous dome, A being borne to giant-land in dreams, A creeping pigmy in a Titan's home: The pyramids are grand, but wildly rude; Here beauty weds magnificence; O Art! Could nobler temple rise from this low sod, Here, from the throng, the whirl of life, apart, A still small voice is whispering to the heart, All things save noble deeds, religion, love. Hark! heard I the far cannon's deepening boom, Saw I a sword bright-flashing through the gloom? He rises yonder with the "eagle eye," Full plumed, and harnessed for his last great fight; Sleep, England's famous captain! such a pile And stainless honour thy prized relics keep; ABOUT PETER BELL AND PRIMROSES. A CUE FROM WORDSWORTH. BY FRANCIS JACOX. What To Wordsworth, the meanest flower that blows could give thoughts which did often lie too deep for tears. To Wordsworth's Peter Bell, a yellow primrose was a yellow primrose, and it was nothing more. more would you have? Peter Bell would have said. Sure never man like him had roamed! yet for all his trudgings over Cheviot Hills and through Yorkshire dales, not by the value of a hair was heart or head the better. "He roved among the vales and streams, in the green wood and hollow dell; they were his dwellings night and day,-but nature ne'er could find the way into the heart of Peter Bell. In vain, through every changeful year, Did Nature lead him as before; Notwithstanding his opportunities, he was not a whit better off in effect than the brutalised town-poor described years ago by the Children's Employment Commission: "You will find poor girls who had . . . . never seen a violet, or a primrose, and other flowers; and some whose only idea of a green field was derived from having been stung by a nettle." But before illustrating the Peter Bell type of taste and intellect in general, a page or so may be given to the literature of the particular flower to which he was so memorably indifferent. Wholly unread was Peter Bell in the language or the literature of flowers. What the poets have said of primroses was to him a matter of supreme indifference. Almost all the poets have something to say of primroses. In Shakspeare, Perdita speaks of And Arviragus, over the supposed corpse of the supposed Fidele, promises with fairest flowers, while summer lasts, to sweeten his sad grave: -Thou shalt not lack The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose. § One of the most picturesque of our old pastoral poets, as variegated a word-painter as he was a genuine lover of nature, puts it next in his floral catalogue to the daisy (scattered on each mead and down, a golden tuft within a silver crown): * Peter Bell, part i. † Report of the Children's Employment Commission, 1843. A Winter's Tale, Act IV. Sc. 3. § Cymbeline, Act IV. Sc. 2. The primrose, when with six leaves gotten grace, The bonny hind squire has to answer the ladye, in the old ballad, a series of questions; to the first of which his reply is, The primrose is the first in flower, That springs in muir or dale.† From Milton we will only Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies.‡ John Clare has a sounet to the pale primrose, that starts up between dead matted leaves of ash and oak, strewn through every lawn and wood: to him, how much its presence beautifies the ground! how sweet its "modest unaffected pride glows on the sunny bank and wood's warm side!"§ Bernard Berton devotes to the evening primrose an octave of stanzas. Miss Mitford makes a stage songstress set aside the red rose, that queen of the garden-bower, and the lady lily that swings her white bells in the breeze of June, in favour of flowers that bloom less pretentiously at a less sunny season : But they who come 'mid frost and flood, Hood's sempstress utters her "Oh but to breathe the breath of the cow- -pluck'd the Primrose at night's dewy noon; Like Hope, it show'd its blossoms in the night;- So that in making up his flowers, and assorting them as symbols, if this poet gives daisies for the morn, and pansies and roses for the noontide hours, he gives primroses for gloom-some, perhaps, would suggest for the gloaming. That is a pretty picture Mrs. Browning paints for us, of the happy violets hiding from the roads The primroses run down to, carrying gold.†† Cowper, in his Winter Walk at Noon, gives us a passing glimpse of -lanes in which the primrose ere her time Peeps through the moss that clothes the hawthorn root.‡‡ Kirke White, too, has his early primrose, opening its tender elegance to nipping gale, unnoticed and alone, serene, the promise of the year: Mild offspring of a dark and sullen sire, Was nursed in whirling storms, *Browne, British Pastorals, ii. 3. † Early English Ballads: The Bonny Hind Squire. + Lycidas. || Rienzi, a Tragedy, Act III. Sc. 2. **Hood's Poems, p. 372, 8th edit. The Task, book vi. § John Clare's Rural Poems. Song of the Shirt. tt Aurora Leigh, book i. Thee, when young Spring first questioned Winter's sway, Thee on this bank he threw To mark his victory.* John Keats shall give us What next? a tuft of evening primroses, O'er which the mind may hover till it doses; O'er which it well might take a pleasant sleep.† We can readily imagine even Peter Bell doing that. In fact, it is the very thing he would most naturally do, if required to let his mind hover o'er the primroses.-Another poet commonly classed with the Keats school, as the jargon of criticism goes, or went, takes us To visit the virgin Primrose where she dwells 'Midst harebells and the wild-wood hyacinths. 'Tis here she keeps her court. Dost see yon bank Of late primroses the Laureate offers us a figurative presentment: Ah, take the imperfect gift I bring, Knowing the primrose yet is dear, The primrose of the later year, As not unlike to that of Spring.§ The penultimate Laureate, describing an autumnal day so bright that it sent into the heart a summer feeling, introduces this among other signs of the season: The solitary primrose on the bank Seem'd now as though it had no cause to mourn His nephew, Hartley, compares Leonard, in one of his narrative poems, to -the last primrose in the shadowy glade, That bloom'd too late, and must too soon decline.¶ Another solitary one he greets on the first of April, 1845,—“ And if a primrose peep, there is but one where wont the starry crowd to look so He paraphrases Milton's line in another poem: jolly."** -as oft in dewy glades, The peering primrose, like a sudden gladness, Frequent, indeed, are gentle Hartley's references to this simple flower. The bold and full-blown beauty of the green; * H. K. White's Poems: To an Early Primrose. Keats's Miscellaneous Poems, from the first in the collection, after the dedication to Leigh Hunt. Barry Cornwall, Dramatic Fragments, cvii. Tennyson, In Memoriam, lxxxiv. Southey: Madoc in Wales, c. xiii. Hartley Coleridge: Leonard and Susan. ** Sonnets on the Seasons, v. ‡‡ Ibid., ii. 91. †† Poems by Hartley Coleridge, i. 45. And in another poem on the Cowslip, again hailed as a lady, and a coy one, he says: Thy sister Primrose is a damsel bold That will be found, mayhap, before we seek; Tall and erect, though modest, yet not weak.* He seems never to tire of the comparison betwixt them twain. In another flowery piece, next to the cowslip, "maiden of the mead," he places the -primrose of the "river's brim," A village lassie, frank and free, Unlike the cowslip tall and slim- Like a Roman bride in her bridal trim.† He was mindful of Wordsworth in that quotation of the "river's brim ;” and Wordsworth is still fuller than he of allusions to the flower Peter Bell could not for the life of him idealise. Long as there's a sun that sets, primroses will have their glory, sings the bard of Rydal in one of his lyrical pieces. In another he says the patient primrose sits like a beggar in the coldg-while the celandine, wiser-witted, slips into sheltering recess. In another he relates how a wren's nest was built in a tree where a primrose concealed it-spreading for a veil the largest of her upright leaves; "and thus, for purposes benign, a simple flower deceives."|| Another poem celebrates a tuft of primroses on the so-called glow-worm rock between Rydal and Grasmere. Hideous warfare had been waged, and kingdoms overthrown, since first the poet spied that primrose-tuft, and marked it for his own; and large and deep were the moral lessons he fain would draw from the blooming of that lonely plant, which dreaded not her annual funeral. And yet once again, there is a sonnet of Wordsworth's which tells how a love-lorn maid once came to a hidden pool, deep and crystal-clear, And, gazing, saw that rose, which from the prime Of echo doth reverberate some sweet sound: The starry treasure from the blue profound She longed to ravish ;-shall she plunge, or climb Of April, smiling high in upper air? Upon the steep rock's breast The lonely Primrose yet renews its bloom, Untouched memento of her hapless doom!** Wordsworth's son-in-law, Mr. Quillinan, often caught something of his inspiration, and this we see in the stanzas headed " A Flower of Fairfield," about a primrose in a nook enshrined, a rocky cleft with mosses lined and overarched with fern: 66 wrens hide not in more jealous cells their precious hoard of speckled shells, than that where hidden blew this golden treasure of the Spring, as brightly delicate a thing as ever Eden knew." And in some lines of welcome to a returning friend, written in winter, he says, amid other compliments, * On a Bunch of Cowslips. To the small Celandine. || A Wren's Nest. **Sonnets on the River Duddon, xxii. †† Poems by Edward Quillinan, p. 13. To the Plant "Everlasting." To the same Flower. The Primrose of the Rock. |