can be and you sigh with or smile at wanting. This defect is fatal not only them, precisely as you do at Theseus and to long poems, but to all save the shortHippolyta. Indeed, we cannot but ad- est; it reduces them instantly to the mire how Shakspere, like the arc of hu- rank of rhymed essays; and a rhymed manity, always bends in all his charac- essay, with most people, is the same ters into the one centre of man-how his thing with a rhapsody. Even dreams villains, ghosts, demons, witches, fairies, require a nexus, a nisus, a nodus, a fools, harlots, heroes, clowns, saints, sen- point, a purpose. Death is but a tame sualists, women, and even his kings, are shadow without the scythe. The want all human, disguises, or half-lengths, or of a purpose in any clear, definite, imminiatures, never caricatures nor apo-pressive form has neutralised the effect logies for mankind. How full the cup of many poems besides Hood's-some of of manhood out of which he could bap- Tennyson's, and one entire class of Sheltise now an Iago, and now an Ague- ley's-whose "Triumph of Life" and cheek-now a Bottom, and now a Mac-"Witch of Atlas" rank with "Lycus" beth-now a Dogberry, and now a Caliban and the "Midnight Fairies"-being, like -now an Ariel, and now a Timon-into them, beautiful, diffuse, vague; and, like the one communion of the one family- them, perpetually promising to bring forth nay, have a drop or two to spare for solid fruit, but yielding at length leaves Messrs Cobweb and Mustardseed, who and blossoms only. are allowed to creep in too among the Subtle fancy, lively wit, and copious number, and who attract a share of the language, are the undoubted qualities of tenderness of their benign father. As Hood as a poet. But, besides, there are in Swift his misanthropy sees the hated two or three moral peculiarities about object in everything, blown out in the him as delightful as his intellectual; and Brobdignagian, shrunk up in the Lilli- they are visible in his serious as well as putian, flapping in the Laputan, and lighter productions. One is his constant yelling with the Yahoo-nay, throws it lightsomeness of spirit and tone. His out into those loathsome reflections, that verse is not a .chant but a carol. Deep he may intensify and multiply his hatred; as may be his internal melancholy, it so in the same way operates the opposite expresses itself in, and yields to, song. feeling in Shakspere. His love to the The heavy thunder-cloud of wo comes race is so great that he would colonise down in the shape of sparkling, soundwith man all space, fairyland, the grave, ing, sunny drops, and thus dissolves. He hell, and heaven. And not only does he casts his melancholy into shapes so fangive to superhuman beings a human in-tastic, that they lure first himself, and terest and nature, but he accomplishes then his readers, to laughter. If he canwhat Hood has not attempted, and what not get rid of the grim gigantic "shadow few else have attempted with success of himself," which walks ever before him, he adjusts the human to the superhuman as before all men, he can, at least, make actors; and the secret of this adjustment, as hinted in a former paper, lies entirely in the humanity which is diffused through every part of the drama. In it, as in one soft ether, float, or swim, or play, or dive, or fly, all his characters.

mouths and cut antics behind its back. This conduct is, in one sense, wise as well as witty, but will, we fear, be imitated by few. Some will continue to follow the Unbaptised Terror, in tame and helpless submission; others will pay In connection with the foregoing de- it vain homage; others will make to it fect, we find in Hood's more elaborate resistance equally vain; and many will poetical pieces no effective story, none that seek to drown in pleasure or forget in can bear the weight of his subtle and beau- business their impression that it walks on tiful imagery. The rich blossoms and before them-silent, perpetual, pausing pods of the peaflower-tree are there, but with their rest, running with their speed, the strong distinct stick of support is growing with their growth, strengthen

ing with their strength, forming itself of its genius it never fails to remember a ghastly rainbow on the fumes of their the cause of the poor; and if it cannot, bowl of festival, lying down with them any more than the kindred spirit of at night, starting up with every start Burns, make for its country some "usefu' that disturbs their slumbers, rising with plan or book," it can "sing a sang at them in the morning, rushing before least." Hood's poetry is often a pleading them like a rival dealer into the market- for those who cannot plead for themplace, and appearing to beckon them on selves, or who plead only like the beggar, behind it, from the death-bed into the who, reproached for his silence, pointed land of shadows, as into its own domain. to his sores, and replied, "Isn't it begging If from this dreadful forerunner we can- I am with a hundred tongues?" This not escape, is it not well done in Hood, advocacy of his has not been thrown utand would it not be well done in others, terly away; it has been heard on earth, to laugh at, as we pursued its inevitable and it has been heard in heaven. steps? It is, after all, perhaps only the The genial kind-heartedness which disfuture greatness of man that throws back tinguished Thomas Hood did not stop this gloom upon his infant being, casting with himself. He silently and insensibly upon him confusion and despair, instead of drew around him a little cluster of kindred exciting him to gladness and to hope. In spirits, who, without the name, have obescaping from this shadow, we should be tained the character and influence of a pawning the prospects of our inmortality. school, which may be called the Latter How cheerily rings Hood's lark-like Cockney School. Who the parent of this note of poetry among the various voices school, properly speaking, was, whether of the age's song-its eagle screams, its Leigh Hunt or Hood, we will not stop to raven croakings, its plaintive nightingale inquire. Perhaps we may rather comstrains! And yet that lark, too, in her pare its members to a cluster of bees lowly nest, had her sorrows, and, per- settling and singing together, without haps, her heart had bled in secret all thought of precedence or feeling of infenight long. But now the "morn is up riority, upon one flower. Leigh Hunt again, the dewy morn," and the sky is and Hood, indeed, have far higher qualiclear, and the wind is still, and the sun- ties of imagination than the others, but shine is bright, and the blue depths seem they possess some properties in common to sigh for her coming; and up rises she with them. All this school have warm to heaven's gate, as aforetime; and as she sympathies, both with man as an indivisoars and sings she remembers her misery dual, and with the ongoings of society at no more; nay, hers seems the chosen voice large. All have a quiet but burning by which Nature would convey the full sense of the evil, the cant, the injustice, gladness of her own heart, in that fa- the inconsistency, the oppression, and the vourite and festal hour. falsehood, that are in the world. All are Best of all in Hood is that warm hu-aware that fierce invective, furious recalmanity which beats in all his writings. citration, and howling despair, can never His is no ostentatious or systematic phi-heal nor mitigate these calamities. All lanthropy; it is a mild, cheerful, irrepres-are believers in their future and permasible feeling, as innocent and tender as nent mitigation; and are convinced that the embrace of a child. It cannot found literature-prosecuted in a proper spirit, soup-kitchens; it can only slide in a few and combined with political and moral rhymes and sonnets to make its species progress—will marvellously tend to this a little happier. Hospitals it is unable to erect, or subscriptions to give-silver and gold it has none; but in the orisons *This thought we copy from Carlyle, who has copied it from the Germans, and they

from Pascal.

VOL. I.-H

result. All have had, or have, too much real or solid sorrow to make of it a matter of parade, or to find or seek in it a frequent source of inspiration. All, finally, would rather laugh than weep men out of their follies, and ministries out of

their mistakes; and, in an age which has toil, in a shady nook of the playground, seen the steam of a tea-kettle applied to and to a little boy. What a ghastly conchange the physical aspect of the earth, trast do all these peaceful images present all have unbounded faith in the mightier to the tale he tells, in its mixture of miracles of moral and political revolution homely horror and shadowy dread! What which the mirth of an English fireside an ear this in which to inject the fell reis yet to effect when properly condensed velation! In what a plain yet powerful and pointed. We rather honour the mo- setting is the awful picture thus inserted! tives than share in the anticipations of And how perfect at once the keeping and this witty and brilliant band. Much the contrast between youthful innocence good they have done and are doing; but and guilt, grey-haired before its time!the full case is beyond them. It is in between the eager, unsuspecting curiosity mechanism, after all, not in magic, that of the listener, and the slow and difficult they trust. We, on the other hand, have throes by which the narrator relieves himhad more hope in the double-divine charm self of his burden of years !-between the which Genius and Religion, fully wedded sympathetic, half-pleasant, half-painful together, are yet to wield; when, in a shudder of the boy, and the strong convulhigh sense, the words of the poet shall be sion of the man! The Giaour, emptying his accomplishedpolluted soul in the gloom of the convent aisle, and to the father trembling instead of his penitent, as the broken and frightful tale gasps on, is not equal in interest nor awe to Eugene Aram recounting his dream to the child, till you as well as he wish, and are tempted to shriek out, that he may awake, and find it indeed a dream. Eugene Aram is not, like Bulwer's hero, a sublime demon in love; he is a mere man in misery, and the poet seeks you to think, and you can think, of nothing about him, no more than himself can, except the one fatal stain which has made him what he is, and which he long has identified with himself. Hood, with the instinct and art of a great painter,

"Love and song, song and love, intertwined

evermore,

Weary earth to the suns of its youth shall

restore."

Mirth like that of "Punch" and Hood can relieve many a fog upon individual minds, but is powerless to remove the great clouds which hang over the general history of humanity; and around even political abuses it often plays harmless as the summer evening's lightning, or, at most, only loosens without smiting them down. Voltaire's smile showed the Bastile in a ludicrous light, as it fantastically fell upon it; but Rousseau's earnestness struck its pinnacle, and Mira-seizes on that moment in Aram's history beau's eloquence overturned it from its base. There is a call in our case for a holier earnestness, and for a purer, nobler oratory.

From the variety of styles which Hood has attempted in his poems, we select the two in which we think him most successful-the homely tragic narrative, and the grave pathetic lyre. We find a specimen of the former in his "Eugene Aram's Dream." This may be called a tale of the Confessional; but how much new interest does it acquire from the circumstances, the scene, and the person to whom the confession is made! Eugene Aram tells his story under the similitude of a dream, in the interval of the school

which formed the hinge of its interestnot the moment of the murder-not the long, silent, devouring remorse that followed-not the hour of the defence, nor of the execution - but that when the dark secret leaped into light and punishment; this thrilling, curdling instant, predicted from the past, and pregnant with the future, is here seized, and startlingly shown. All that went before was merely horrible; all that followed is horrible and vulgar: the poetic moment in the story is intense. And how inferior the laboured power and pathos of the last volume of Bulwer's novel to these lines!

"That very night, while gentle sleep The urchin eyelids kiss'd,

Two stern-faced men set out from Lynn
Through the cold and heavy mist;
And Eugene Aram walk'd between,
With gyves upon his wrist."

And here, how much of the horror is
breathed upon us from the calm bed of
the sleeping boy!

The two best of his grave, pathetic lyrics are the "Song of the Shirt" and the "Bridge of Sighs." The first was certainly Hood's great hit, although we were as much ashamed as rejoiced at its success. We blushed when we thought that at that stage of his life he needed such an introduction to the public, and that thousands and tens of thousands were now, for the first time, induced to ask—"Who's Thomas Hood?" The majority of even the readers of the age had never heard of his name till they saw it in "Punch," and connected with a song -first-rate, certainly, but not better than many of his former poems! It casts, to us, a strange light upon the chance medleys of fame, and on the lines of Shakspere

"There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to for

tune."

Alas! in Hood's instance, to fortune it did not lead, and the fame was brief lightning before darkness.

that world of wild confused wailings, which are the true "cries of London," but, alas! that it has gone down again into the abyss, and that we are now employed in criticising its artistic quality, instead of recording its moral effect. Not altogether in vain, indeed, has it sounded, if it have comforted one lonely heart, if it have bedewed with tears one arid eye, and saved to even one sufferer a pang of a kind which Shakspere only saw in part, when he spoke of the "proud man's contumely"-the contumely of a proud, imperious, fashionable, hard-hearted woman -"one that was a woman, but, rest her soul, she's dead."

Not the least striking nor impressive thing in this "Song of the Shirt" is its half-jesting tone, and light, easy gallop. What sound in the streets so lamentable as the laughter of a lost female! It is more melancholy than even the deathcough shrieking up through her shattered frame, for it speaks of rest, death, the grave, forgetfulness, perhaps forgiveness. So Hood into the centre of this true tragedy has, with a skilful and sparing hand, dropped a pun or two, a conceit or two; and these quibbles are precisely what make you quake. "Every tear hinders needle and thread," reminds us distantly of these words, occurring in the And what is the song which made very centre of the Lear agony, "Nuncle, Hood awake one morning and find him- it is a naughty night to swim in." Hood, self famous? Its great merit is its truth. as well as Shakspere, knew that, to deepHood sits down beside the poor seam-en the deepest wo of humanity, it is the stress as beside a sister, counts her tears, best way to show it in the lurid light of her stitches, her bones-too transparent mirth; that there is a sorrow too deep for by far through the sallow skin-sees that tears, too deep for sighs, but none too though degraded she is a woman still; deep for smiles; and that the aside and and rising up, swears by Him that liveth the laughter of an idiot might accompany for ever and ever, that he will make her and serve to aggravate the anguish of a wrongs and wretchedness known to the god. And what tragedy in that swallimits of the country and of the race. low's back which "twits with the spring" He echoes her voice-and hark! how, to this captive without crime, this suicide that cracked tuneless voice, trembling without intention, this martyr without under its burden of sorrow, now shrunk the prospect of a fiery chariot!

The

down into the whispers of weakness, and Bridge of Sighs" breathes a now shuddering up into the laughter of deeper breath of the same spirit. The despair, all Britain listens for a moment poet is arrested by a crowd in the street: -listens, meets, talks, and does little or he pauses, and finds that it is a female nothing. It was much that one shrill suicide whom they have plucked dead shriek should rise and reverberate above from the waters. His heart holds its

own coroner's inquest upon her, and the cherished into a necessity and a disease. poem is the verdict. Such verdicts are Nothing could be more easily acquired not common in the courts of men. It than the power of punning, if, in Dr sounds like a voice from a loftier climate, Johnson's language, one's mind were but like the cry which closes "The Faust," to abandon itself to it. What poor "she is pardoned." He knows not- creatures you meet, from whom puns what the jury will know in an hour-the come as easily as perspiration. If this cause of her crime. He wishes not to was a disease in Hood, he turned it into know it. He cannot determine what a "commodity." His innumerable puns, proportions of guilt, misery, and madness like the minnikin multitudes of Lilliput have mingled with her "mutiny." He supplying the wants of the Man Mounknows only she was miserable, and she is tain, fed, clothed, and paid his rent. dead-dead, and therefore away to a This was more than Aram Dreams or higher tribunal. He knows only that, Shirt Songs could have done, had he whate'er her guilt, she never ceased to be written them in scores. Some, we know, a woman, to be a sister, and that death, will, on the other hand, contend that his for him hushing all questions, hiding all facility in punning was the outer form of faults, has left on her "only the beau- his inner faculty of minute analogical tiful." What can he do? He forgives perception-that it was the same power her in the name of humanity; every heart says amen; and his verdict, thus repeated and confirmed, may go down to eternity.

at play-that the eye which, when earnestly and piercingly directed, can perceive delicate resemblances in things, has only to be opened to see like words dancHere, too, as in the "Song of the ing into each other's embrace; and that Shirt," the effect is trebled by the out- this, and not the perverted taste of the ward levity of the strain. Light and age, accounts for Shakspere's puns; pungay the masquerade his grieved heart ning being but the game of football, puts on; but its every flower, feather, by which he brought a great day's laand fringe shakes in the internal anguish bour to a close. Be this as it may, Hood as in a tempest. This one stanza (coldly punned to live, and made many suspect praised by a recent writer in the "Edinburgh Review," whose heart and intellect seem to be alike extinct, but to us how unspeakably dear!) might perpetuate the name of Hood:

"The bleak wind of March.

Made her tremble and shiver,
But not the dark arch,

Nor the black flowing river;
Mad from life's history-
Glad to death's mystery
Swift to be hurl'd,
Anywhere, anywhere
Out of the world!"

After all this, we "have not the heart," as Lord Jeffrey used to say, to turn to his "Whims and Oddities," &c., at large. "Here lies one who spat more blood and made more puns than any man living," was his self-proposed epitaph. Whether punning was natural to him or not, we cannot tell. We fear that with him, as with most people, it was a bad habit,

that he lived to pun. This, however, was a mistake. For, apart from his serious pretensions as a poet, his puns swam in a sea of humour, farce, drollery, fun of every kind. Parody, caricature, quiz, innocent double entendre, mad exaggeration, laughter holding both his sides, sense turned awry, and downright, staring, slavering nonsense, were all to be found in his writings. Indeed, every species of wit. and humour abounded, with, perhaps, two exceptions:-the quiet, deep, ironical smile of Addison, and the misanthropic grin of Swift (forming a stronger antithesis to a laugh than the blackest of frowns), were not in Hood. Each was peculiar to the single man whose face bore it, and shall probably re-appear no more. For Addison's matchless smile we may look and long in vain; and forbid that such a horrible distortion of the human face divine as Swift's grin (disowned for ever by the fine, chubby, kindly