Pearl pleasant to prince’s pleasure,
  Most cleanly closed in gold so clear! 
  Out of the Orient, I boldly say,
  I never proved her precious equal;
  So round, so beautiful in every point! 
  So small, so smooth, her sides were!

  Wheresoever I judged gemmes gay
  I set her singly in singleness. 
  Alas!  I lost her in an arbour;
  Through the grass to the ground it from me went. 
  I pine, sorely wounded by dangerous love
  Of that especial pearl without spot.

The father calls himself a jeweller; the pearl is his daughter.  He has lost the pearl in the grass; it has gone to the ground, and he cannot find it; that is, his daughter is dead and buried.  Perhaps the most touching line is one in which he says to the grave: 

  O moul, thou marrez a myry mele. 
  (O mould, thou marrest a merry talk.)

The poet, who is surely the father himself, cannot always keep up the allegory; his heart burns holes in it constantly; at one time he says she, at another it, and, between the girl and the pearl, the poem is bewildered.  But the allegory helps him out with what he means notwithstanding; for although the highest aim of poetry is to say the deepest things in the simplest manner, humanity must turn from mode to mode, and try a thousand, ere it finds the best.  The individual, in his new endeavour to make “the word cousin to the deed,” must take up the forms his fathers have left him, and add to them, if he may, new forms of his own.  In both the great revivals of literature, the very material of poetry was allegory.

The father falls asleep on his child’s grave, and has a dream, or rather a vision, of a country where everything—­after the childish imagination which invents differences instead of discovering harmonies—­is super-naturally beautiful:  rich rocks with a gleaming glory, crystal cliffs, woods with blue trunks and leaves of burnished silver, gravel of precious Orient pearls, form the landscape, in which are delicious fruits, and birds of flaming colours and sweet songs:  its loveliness no man with a tongue is worthy to describe.  He comes to the bank of a river: 

  Swinging sweet the water did sweep
  With a whispering speech flowing adown;
  (Wyth a rownande rourde raykande aryght)

and the stones at the bottom were shining like stars.  It is a noteworthy specimen of the mode in which the imagination works when invention is dissociated from observation and faith.  But the sort of way in which some would improve the world now, if they might, is not so very far in advance of this would-be glorification of Nature.  The barest heath and sky have lovelinesses infinitely beyond the most gorgeous of such phantasmagoric idealization of her beauties; and the most wretched condition of humanity struggling for existence contains elements of worth and future development inappreciable by the philanthropy that would elevate them by cultivating their self-love.