us alone, massive and conspicuous, a mighty and mysterious fragment, the Stonehenge of modern moralists. Shall we inscribe immortality upon the shapeless yet sublime structure? He who reared it seems, from the elevation he has now reached, to answer, No; what is the thing you call immortality to me, who have cleft that deep shadow and entered on this greater and brighter state of being?

We dare not say, with a writer formerly quoted, that to “Foster the cloud has now become the sun." But certainly we may say to him, “Behold the darkness is past, and the true light now shineth,” if not in its noonday effulgence, yet at least in its mild and twilight softness. In the night he dwelt, and although the visage of death may not have been to him the glorious laminary he expected, yet is it not much that the night is gone, and gone for ever? We take our leave of him in his own words— “Paid the debt of nature. No; it is not paying a debt, it is rather like bringing a note to a bank to obtain solid gold in exchange for it. In this case you bring this cumbrous body, which is nothing worth, and which you could not wish to retain long; you lay it down, and receive for it, from the eternal treasures, liberty, victory, knowledge, rapture."

66

THOMAS HOOD.

It is the lot of some men of genius to be born as if in the blank space between Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Penseroso," their proximity to both originally equal, and their adhesion to the one or the other depending upon casual circumstances. While some pendulate perpetually between the grave and the gay, others are carried off bodily, as it happens, by the comic or the tragic muse. A few there are who seem to say, of their own deliberate option, Mirth, with thee we mean to live;" deeming it better to go to the house of feasting than to that of mourning—while the storm of adversity drives others to pursue sad and dreary paths, not at first congenial to their natures. Such men as Shakspere, Burns, and Byron, continue, all their lives long, to pass, in rapid and perpetual change, from the one province to the other; and this, indeed, is the main source of their boundless ascendency over the general mind. In Young, of the "Night Thoughts," the laughter, never very joyous, is converted, through the effect of gloomy casualties, into the ghastly grin of the skeleton Death-the pointed satire is exchanged for the solemn sermon. In Cowper, the fine schoolboy glee which inspirits his humour goes down at

last, and is quenched like a spark in the wild abyss of his madness- "John Gilpin" merges in the "Castaway." Hood, on the other hand, with his strongest tendencies originally to the pathetic and the fantastic-serious, shrinks in timidity from the face of the inner sun of his nature-shies the stoop of the descending Pythonic power—and, feeling that if he wept at all it were floods of burning and terrible tears, laughs, and does little else but laugh, instead.

We look upon this writer as a quaint masquer—as wearing above a manly and profound nature a fantastic and deliberate disguise of folly. He reminds us of Brutus, cloaking under pretended idiocy a stern and serious design which burns in his breast, but which he chooses in this way only to disclose. A deep message has come to him from the heights of his nature, but, like the ancient prophet, he is forced to cry out, "I cannot speak-I am a child!"

66

Certainly there was, at the foundation of Hood's soul, a seriousness, which all his puns and mummeries could but indifferently conceal. Jacques, in the forest of Arden, mused not with a profounder pathos, or in quainter language, upon the sad pageant of humanity than does he; and yet, like him, his "lungs" are ever ready to crow like chanticleer" at the sight of its grotesquer absurdities. Verily, the goddess of melancholy owes a deep grudge to the mirthful magician who carried off such a promising votary. It is not every day that one who might have been a great serious poet will condescend to sink into a punster and editor of comic annuals. And, were it not that his original tendencies continued to be manifested to the last, and that he turned his drollery to important account, we would be tempted to be angry, as well as to regret, that he chose to play the fool rather than King Lear in the play.

As a poet, Hood belongs to the school of John Keats and Leigh Hunt, with qualities of his own, and an all but entire freedom from their peculiarities of manner and style. What strikes us, in the first place, about him, is his great variety of subject and mode of treatment. His works are in two small duodecimo volumes; and yet we find in them five or six distinct styles attempted and attempted with success. There is the classicalthere is the fanciful, or, as we might almost call it, the "Midsummer Night"—there is the homely tragic narrative-there is the wildly grotesque-there is the light, and there is the grave and pathetic-lyric. And, besides, there is a style, which we despair of describing by any one single or compound epithet, of which his "Elm Tree" and "Haunted House" are specimensresembling Tennyson's "Talking Oak"-and the secret and power of which, perhaps, lie in the feeling of mystic correspondence between man and inanimate nature, in the start of momentary

consciousness with which we sometimes feel that in nature's company we are not alone, that nature's silence is not that of death; and are aware, in the highest and grandest sense, that we are "made of dust," and that the dust from which we were once taken is still divine. We know few volumes of poetry where we find, in the same compass, so little mannerism, so little self-repetition, such a varied concert, along with such unique harmony of sound.

Through these varied numerous styles, we find two or three main elements distinctly traceable in all Hood's poems. One is a singular subtlety in the perception of minute analogies. The weakness, as well as the strength of his poetry, is derived from this source. His serious verse, as well as his witty prose, is laden and encumbered with thick coming fancies. Hence, some of his finest pieces are tedious without being long. Little more than ballads in size, they are books in the reader's feeling. Every one knows how resistance adds to the idea of extension, and how roughness impedes progress. Some of Hood's poems, such as "Lycus," are rough as the centaur's hide; and, having difficulty in passing along, you are tempted to pass them by altogether. And though a few, feeling that there is around them the power and spell of genius, generously cry, "There's true metal here, when we have leisure, we must return to this," yet they never do. In fact, Hood has not been able to infuse human interest into his fairy or mythological creations. He has conceived them in a happy hour; surely on one of those days when the soul and nature are one-when one calm bond of peace seems to unite all things when the sun seems to slumber, and the sky to smile— when the air becomes a wide balm, and the low wind, as it wanders over flowers, seems telling some happy tidings in each gorgeous ear, till the rose blushes a deep crimson, and the tulip lifts up a more towering head, and the violet shrinks more modestly away as at lovers' whispers; in such a favoured hour-when the first strain of music might have arisen, or the first stroke of painting been drawn, or the chisel of the first sculptor been heard, or the first verse of poetry been chanted, or man himself, a nobler harmony than lute ever sounded, a finer line than painter ever drew, a statelier structure and a diviner song, arisen from the dust -did the beautiful idea of the "Plea of the Midsummer Fairies" dawn upon this poet's mind. But although he has conceived his fairies in a happy hour, and framed them with exquisite skill and a fine eye to poetic proportion, he has not made them alive-he has not made them objects of love; and you care less for his centaurs and his fairies than you do for the moonbeams or the shed leaves of the forest. How different with the Oberon and the Titania of Shakspere! They are true to the fairy ideal, and yet they are human their hearts warm with human passions, as fond of gossip, flattery, intrigue, and quarrel, as men or women can be—and

you sigh with or smile at them, precisely as you do at Theseus and Hippolyta. Indeed, we cannot but admire how Shakspere, like the arc of humanity, always bends in all his characters into the one centre of man-how his villains, ghosts, demons, witches, fairies, fools, harlots, heroes, clowns, saints, sensualists, women, and even his kings, are all human, disguises, or half-lengths, or miniatures, never caricatures nor apologies for mankind. How full the cup of manhood out of which he could baptise-now an Iago, and now an Ague-cheek—now a Bottom, and now a Macbeth-now a Dogberry, and now a Caliban—now an Ariel, and now a Timon-into the one communion of the one family-nay, have a drop or two to spare for Messrs Cobweb and Mustardseed, who are allowed to creep in too among the number, and who attract a share of the tenderness of their benign father. As in Swift, his misanthropy sees the hated object in everything, blown out in the Brobdignagian, shrunk up in the Lilliputian, flapping in the Laputan, and yelling with the Yahoo-nay, throws it out into those loathsome reflections, that he may intensify and multiply his hatred; so in the same way operates the opposite feeling in Shakspere. His love to the race is so great that he would colonise with man all space, fairyland, the grave, hell, and heaven. And not only does he give to superhuman beings a human interest and nature, but he accomplishes what Hood has not attempted, and what few else have attempted with success-he adjusts the human to the superhuman actors; they never jostle, you never wonder at finding them on the same stage, they meet without a start, they part without a shiver, they obey one magic; and you feel that not only does one touch of nature make the whole world kin, but that it can link the universe in one brotherhood, for the secret of this adjustment 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.

In connection with the foregoing defect, we find in Hood's more elaborate poetical pieces no effective story, none that can bear the weight of his subtle and beautiful imagery. The rich blossoms and pods of the peaflower-tree are there, but the strong distinct stick of support is wanting. This defect is fatal not only to long poems, but to all save the shortest; it reduces them instantly to the rank of rhymed essays; and a rhymed essay, with most people, is the same thing with a rhapsody. Even dreams require a nexus, a nisus, a nodus, a point, a purpose. Death is but a tame shadow without the scythe. The want of a purpose in any clear, definite, impressive form has neutralised the effect of many poems besides Hood's-some of Tennyson's, and one entire class of Shelley's-whose "Triumph of Life" and "Witch of Atlas" rank with "Lycus" and the "Midnight Fairies"-being, like them, beautiful, diffuse, vague; and, like them, perpetually

promising to bring forth solid fruit, but yielding at length leaves and blossoms only.

66

Subtle fancy, lively wit, and copious language, are the undoubted qualities of Hood as a poet. But, besides, there are two or three moral peculiarities about him as delightful as his intellectual; and they are visible in his serious as well as lighter productions. One is his constant lightsomeness of spirit and tone. His verse is not a chant but a carol. Deep as may be his internal melancholy, it expresses itself in, and yields to, song. The heavy thunder-cloud of wo comes down in the shape of sparkling, sounding, sunny drops, and thus dissolves. He casts his melancholy into shapes so fantastic, that they lure first himself, and then his readers, to laughter. If he cannot get rid of the grim gigantic shadow of himself,” which walks ever before him, as before all men, he can, at least, make 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 it vain homage; others will make to it resistance equally vain; and many will seek to drown in pleasure, or forget in business, their impression that it walks on before them-silent, perpetual, pausing with their rest, running with their speed, growing with their growth, strengthening with their strength, forming itself a ghastly rainbow on the fumes of their bowl of festival, lying down with them at night, starting up with every start that disturbs their slumbers, rising with them in the morning, rushing before them like a rival dealer into the market-place, and appearing to beckon them on behind it, from the deathbed into the land of shadows, as into its own domain. If from this dreadful forerunner we cannot escape, is it not well done in Hood, and would it not be well done in others, to laugh at, as we pursued its inevitable steps? It is, after all, perhaps only the future greatness of man that throws back this gloom upon his infant being, casting upon him confusion and despair, instead of exciting him to gladness and to hope.* In escaping from this shadow, we should be pawning the prospects of our immortality.

How cheerily rings Hood's lark-like note of poetry among the various voices of the age's song-its eagle screams, its raven croakings, its plaintive nightingale strains! And yet that lark, too, in her lowly nest, had her sorrows, and, perhaps, her heart had bled in secret all night long. But now the “ morn is up again, the dewy morn," and the sky is clear, and the wind is still, and the sunshine is bright, and the blue depths seem to sigh for her coming; and up rises she to heaven's gate, as aforetime; and

This thought we copy from Carlyle, who has copied it from the Germans, and they from Pascal.