This language,
perhaps, will sound like treason to many; but permit me to give an
instance in which the late poet-laureate seems to have admitted (which
he did not often do) that he was wrong.
In the first edition of the poem of Peter Bell (the genuine, and not the
pseudo-Peter), London, 8vo. 1819, that personage sets to work to bang
the poor ass, the result of which is this, p. 36.:
"Among the rocks and winding crags--
Among the mountains far away--
Once more the ass did lengthen out
More ruefully an endless shout,
The long dry see-saw of his horrible bray."{146}
After remarks on Peter's strange state of mind when saluted by this
horrible music, and describing him as preparing to seize the ass by the
neck, we are told his purpose was interrupted by something he just then
saw in the water, which afterwards proves to be a corpse. The reader is,
however, first excited and disposed to expect something horrible by the
following startling conjectures:--
"Is it the moon's distorted face?
The ghost-like image of a cloud?
Is it a gallows these pourtrayed?
Is Peter of himself afraid?
Is it a coffin--or a shroud?
"A grisly idol hewn in stone?
Or imp from witch's lap let fall?
Or a gay ring of shining fairies,
Such as pursue their brisk vagaries
In sylvan bower or haunted hall?
"Is it a fiend that to a stake
Of fire his desperate self is tethering?
Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell
In solitary ward or cell,
Ten thousand miles from all his brethren.
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