No More Learning

Furious he rode, where late he ran,
Lashing and spurring his tame hobby;
Turned to a formal puritan, _550
A solemn and unsexual man,--
He half believed "White Obi".

20.
This steed in vision he would ride,
High trotting over nine-inch bridges,
With Flibbertigibbet, imp of pride, _555
Mocking and mowing by his side--
A mad-brained goblin for a guide--
Over corn-fields, gates, and hedges.

21.
After these ghastly rides, he came
Home to his heart, and found from thence _560
Much stolen of its accustomed flame;
His thoughts grew weak, drowsy, and lame
Of their intelligence.

22.
To Peter's view, all seemed one hue;
He was no Whig, he was no Tory; _565
No Deist and no Christian he;--
He got so subtle, that to be
Nothing, was all his glory.

23.
One single point in his belief
From his organization sprung, _570
The heart-enrooted faith, the chief
Ear in his doctrines' blighted sheaf,
That 'Happiness is wrong';

24.
So thought Calvin and Dominic;
So think their fierce successors, who _575
Even now would neither stint nor stick
Our flesh from off our bones to pick,
If they might 'do their do. '

25.
His morals thus were undermined:--
The old Peter--the hard, old Potter-- _580
Was born anew within his mind;
He grew dull, harsh, sly, unrefined,
As when he tramped beside the Otter. (1)

26.
In the death hues of agony
Lambently flashing from a fish, _585
Now Peter felt amused to see
Shades like a rainbow's rise and flee,
Mixed with a certain hungry wish(2).

27.
So in his Country's dying face
He looked--and, lovely as she lay, _590
Seeking in vain his last embrace,
Wailing her own abandoned case,
With hardened sneer he turned away:

28.
And coolly to his own soul said;--
'Do you not think that we might make _595
A poem on her when she's dead:--
Or, no--a thought is in my head--
Her shroud for a new sheet I'll take:

29.
'My wife wants one. --Let who will bury
This mangled corpse! And I and you, _600
My dearest Soul, will then make merry,
As the Prince Regent did with Sherry,--'
'Ay--and at last desert me too. '

30.
And so his Soul would not be gay,
But moaned within him; like a fawn _605
Moaning within a cave, it lay
Wounded and wasting, day by day,
Till all its life of life was gone.

31.
As troubled skies stain waters clear,
The storm in Peter's heart and mind _610
Now made his verses dark and queer:
They were the ghosts of what they were,
Shaking dim grave-clothes in the wind.

32.
For he now raved enormous folly,
Of Baptisms, Sunday-schools, and Graves, _615
'Twould make George Colman melancholy
To have heard him, like a male Molly,
Chanting those stupid staves.

33.
Yet the Reviews, who heaped abuse
On Peter while he wrote for freedom, _620
So soon as in his song they spy
The folly which soothes tyranny,
Praise him, for those who feed 'em.

34.
'He was a man, too great to scan;--
A planet lost in truth's keen rays:-- _625
His virtue, awful and prodigious;--
He was the most sublime, religious,
Pure-minded Poet of these days. '

35.