If there were dreams to sell,... Merry and sad to tell, And the crier rang the bell, What would you buy?

These lines are from Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s lyric “Dream-Pedlary,” a poem that imagines a street hawker (a “pedlar”) offering dreams for sale like wares in a marketplace. Beddoes wrote much of his poetry in the 1820s–30s, but it circulated imperfectly during his lifetime; “Dream-Pedlary” became best known through posthumous publication and later anthologizing. The poem’s framing—an itinerant seller crying his goods and ringing a bell—draws on familiar early‑modern and Romantic-era street-trade imagery, using it to stage an intimate question to the listener/reader: if dreams could be chosen and purchased, what kind would you select?

Beddoes imagines dreams treated as market goods—hawked by a “crier” ringing a bell—so that private longings, fears, and consolations become items one might deliberately choose. The mingling of “merry and sad” suggests the full emotional range of dreaming, from wish-fulfillment to grief and dread. The closing question, “What would you buy?”, turns the fantasy into a moral-psychological test: if you could select your inner life, would you purchase comfort, excitement, truth, oblivion, or sorrow? The stanza also hints at the commodification of imagination and the uneasy idea that even our most intimate experiences might be subject to appetite, fashion, and transaction.