From the Dublin University Magazine.
THE LATE THOMAS HOOD.

"Poor Tom Hood!" For Hood was a universal favorite-a pet of the public. Men would as little have thought of sternly We rejoice that Hood's verses have been taking Hood to task, as of rebuking the collected. The collection, the short pre- quick-glancing fancies of a bright-eyed face to these volumes informs us, "is made thoughtful child. He was one of those in fulfilment of his own desire; it was whom most of us who had never beheld his among his last instructions to those who face in the flesh, knew, by a sort of indiwere dearest to him." The injunction only rect intellectual intimacy better than comshowed a just sense of the rights of his mon acquaintanceship. How often he came own remarkable and original genius. There to us "as a pleasant thought, when such is a phrase which seems to have been blown are wanted!" How often did the careupon by Cockneysim, till one is nervous wrinkled forehead smooth under the passabout using it, and yet, if Cockneyism would ing influence of one of his incomparable have let it alone, it is a pretty and expressive fragments of humor, caught in the Poet's phrase enough; Hood's verses are "refresh- Corner of some country newspaper, where ing"-specially refreshing to us profession- the smiling little violet modestly blossomed al employers of poetical common-place-re- in the midst of thorny brakes-of pastorals freshing as rural breezes to one" long in populous city pent," who draws his easy and invigorated breath upon the slope of some heaven-kissing Wicklow hill after days and weeks of Sackville-street and Merrion-square in July.

(not of Theocritus, but) of Doctor MacHale, of speeches of Mr. Joseph Hume, and dissertations on railroads, and infallible receipts for the bite of a mad dog! And there is something peculiarly pathetic about the death of a humorist-of a humorWe wish we had a half-sovereign (for ist true-hearted and blameless as Hood was. our desires are moderate and reasonable) Shakspeare has embodied and immortalized for every single individual who, opening the feelings of us all in the Yorick scene these two neat little volumes, will give in Hamlet. Death-grim and ghastly the first utterance to his thoughts in the Death-what business had the old scythesthree simple but weighty monosyllables-man, his crapes and his cross-bones-with VOL. III.-No. III.

55

cold as the starry midnight. Humor tender and vague as the moon-lit eve. Wit is of the head; Humor of the heart; angels and devils may be witty-man alone has humor. With such spirits as Hood and Charles Lamb this was eminently manifested. They were both men of profound feeling, men of a large soul for fellow-man, sighing amid all their smiles, and flowing deep, with all

our Tom Hood? with this" fellow of infi- Humor is not the gem so much as the flownite jest and most excellent fancy "-his er, the creature of the rain and the beam "gibes, his gambols, and his flashes of-of tears and smiles. Wit is clear and merriment?" Could he not have been well content-we should not have had a word against it to take to himself a score of political economists, and leave us our own Tom Hood? Were there not critics weekly, monthly, quarterly? Had he no nice pickings in the Corn Law League? No Irish repealers under whose loss the world would have been meekly resigned? Were there no profoundly learned Doctors of the surface-sparkle of their playfulness. Laws and of Divinity-no discoverers of That keen susceptibility of the ludicrous, "a new system of the philosophy of the and prompt inventiveness in all the ways human mind"-no grave statisticians pow- of exciting it, were in them compatible with erful in population and poor laws? or if he a very learned spirit of human dealings, must have his "men of wit about town," and much of the pitying temper that knowwas Brookes's, indeed, unpeopled of its ledge works in worthy hearts. We do not Whigs, or the Tories of the Carlton all very well know the precise idiosyncrasy of scattered and Peeled? Alas! that that brain old Democritus; his hard materialist phi-the exquisitely sensitive instrument of losophy does not speak too well for it; but delicate thought-should now be formless he might have been, for all his perennial dust! that tricksy spirit now naked and grin, as tender-souled a being as ever was unbodied—no arch and flexible lip to quiver his weeping brother sage of Ephesus. with the coming jest, no eye to twinkle with the inward joy of drollest fancies!

Were we (to the unspeakable sorrow of universal literature) far gone in a deep But Hood was much more than a humor- ditch, and both by some metempsychosis ist, he was (and his parting request shows contrived in this nineteenth century, to pass that, with all his unaffected modesty he by that way, we should back Heraclitus to knew it) a true and genuine poet. There be the first to desert us; he would have too have been spirits of loftier flight and more much to do wiping his eyes at our distressenduring wing, natives of the upper ele-es, poor fellow! to be able to turn his hands ment, whose home was the empyrean; with to any other use. The world, which in these we dare not rank him; but the eagle matters within its own coarse daily ken, is is not solitary in the heavens; and if he seldom wholly wrong, has always felt it; it alone, undazzled by the beam of mid-day, distrusts ostentatious mourners; it suspects can dare to give the great Sun himself where tears are so promptly shed that the glance for glance, there are other winged stream readily overflows only because the creatures who are satisfied to receive his channel is shallow; while it is unfortunateradiance upon their bright and glossy plu- ly but too willing to sympathize with joyous magebonhommie, and to give to careless good "Whose dripping wings flash sun-light as they humor, at the same time, of which we now fellowship all the honors of the heart. The veer,"

speak is much more than this; so much
more, indeed, that your humorist is fre-
quently the least pliable of good fellows;
often a proverbial "oddity "-
-a solitary self-
reflective observer-unpopular with the
mass whom he makes uncomfortable--dear
and precious to the few.

whose nests are not in the pathless crags, but deep in the bowery woodlands, where, amid all that sea of waving trees beneath, the winged wanderer-the floating flower of the air-drops, with the unerring instinct of love, upon his own expectant home. Man alone laughs; for he alone perpetIt is, indeed, observable that true humor ually contrasts his state with a higher ideal is seldom, if ever, unaccompanied with a-the failure with the success, the accidendeep sense and faculty of the pathetic. tal with the immutable, the false with the This is one of its ordinary practical distinc-real, the is with the ought to be. The brute tions from wit. Wit is, in its essence, feel-is too low, the angel too lofty, for that ingless; the pure, intellectual concretion; strange mingled emotion of proud sarcastic the icy crystal that glitters and chills. pleasure which is so appropriate to a medi

al creature, who, midway between the de- tirical fancy shoot oftentimes at random, mon and the demigod, is ever greater and to enjoy their abounding strength; Swift ever less than himself. never throws away a shot,-he fits his ar row to the bow, eyes his shrinking victim, and cleaves the heart. There is a terrible seriousness in his jests. Yet, let no man think to lightly settle the question of the influence of Swift's writings. They tend to make us uncomfortable; but they tend to make us honest. It is not pleasant to gaze on the flayed Marsyas; but the beauty which is skin-deep may the less deceive us after such a sight.

Probably in Sterne-in my Uncle Toby the perfection of genuine humor was nearly attained; and what a model is that of pathetic nature! How prodigious must have been the amount of the corruption that spoiled Sterne's heart! Of all the dread phenomena of human perversity,

It has often been said-and no man fit to read the book will ever gainsay it-that Don Quixote is a work of pathos. Insanity, indeed, can hardly ever raise feelings of the unmingled ludicrous; and still less such insanity as this! Consider it well. A noble-hearted old man, a genuine Spanish gentleman, though, it may be, in somewhat shattered circumstances; with a brain overcharged with visions of ideal perfection, eager, after his own fashion, to redress wrongs and restore the balance of the world, sincerer than many of the lights of chivalry he thought to imitate, ever more compassionate, chaste, high-principled, religious, gallant—it is the very miracle of the author's genius, not so much to have written the book that of all others has made there is none more mournful than the utmankind laugh, as with such a hero to have ter separation of the moral immagination prevented us from weeping. Rabelais, in- from the practical moral belief; or, what deed, has little pathos; it is owing to this is perhaps the truer statement-the sepavery want, almost as much as to his ineffa- ration of the moral belief itself from all'its ble grossness, that in spite of all that vigor designed control over the life of its posof exulting fancy, rolling and wallowing in sessor. How awful this dwelling of the its own infinite ocean of mirth, ruling with ONE man in two worlds, without one point a conqueror's caprices the whole empire of of contact between them; the world of fun, Rabelais is scarcely, except by curious students, read. Swift-so often compared with Rabelais, and certainly rivalling his filth-does not, whatever Pope may say, sit "in Rabelais' easy chair;" Swift's seat is no easy chair; better name it "the seat of the scornful," the restless couch of a stern and merciless spirit, pouring itself out in those undying works, not in self-indulgent merriment, but in bitter and burning contempt. Hypocrisy of all kinds Swift had a fearful gift to penetrate and to disgrace; but his scorn is almost as dark and terrible as the hypocrisy itself; which will you have -the tears of the crocodile or the laughter of the hyena? Accordingly, Swift is more of the wit than the humorist; his manufacture is the work of intellect, as clear and keen as a mathematician's; his invention is the servant and instrument of his reason; every thing in his boldest conceptions has its object, and that, for the most part, distinct and decisive. In his very ribaldry, there is no "superfluity of naughtiness;" he discards as an incumbrance the loose vesture of imaginative phraseology and decoration-not because he could not, but would not, adopt it; the poet may come down to the arena in his singing-robes, but Swift strips for the fight. Other men of sa

imagination-of the closet and the desk-
with its glorious population of ideal excel-
lences, models of pure and persuasive vir-
tue, beings of thought so real and inde-
structible, that, clothed in language, they
shall live and govern mankind for countless,
ages-to dwell amid such a society, the
gifted freeman of such a City of God, the
inward conscience of the genius who cre-
ates and upholds them, itself audibly speak-
ing in every such vision that he moulds;
and the world of practical life, mean, am-
bitious, sensual, selfish-unvisited by one
ray of the starry influences of its sister
sphere, lower far and more despicable than
that of the most illiterate cottager, whose
views are bounded by the narrow circle of
the fields he tills;-and to think that these
currents should twine in subtlest links,
each day, each hour, nay, each minute,
yet never blend, the lovely creations of
fancy still rising in their bright profusion,
unsoiled and immaculate, the low and
worldly calculations of the same mind,
now the schemer for advancement or gain,
mingling through that crowd of glorious
thoughts unabashed and unrebuked by the
high presence in which they move! And
then the fearful facility with which the hab-
it is acquired; the rapidity with which the

divorce is accomplished between the winged | first rose and was matured; its Spirit of imagination and the creeping life, and the he Mine and the Mountain, its Walpurgis arrangement decorously effected that each Night,-the very personification of the shall vigorously pursue its own business, in arch-Fiend himself in our northern fancies its own proper element, and neither dis--has a sort of horrible drollery. But inturb the other. deed, to pass from special instances to huBut to our task from this too sad digres-man nature itself, there is a border-land in sion ! all our experience which seems the chance We are not, then, to wonder that Hood's possession, as our fancies alternate, of the web of humorous fancies should be inter- ludicrous and the terrible. Nay, there is woven with its thread of pensive thought a laughter appropriate to wretchedness itat times. The peculiar tone of many of self; "moody madness laughs wild amid his serious poems is, however, worthy of severest woe." That resolution of the sysspecial note. Those who chiefly know tem which belongs alike to extreme joy and him by his Comic Annuals, and those extreme misery utters itself alike in both flashes of occasional mirth with which he cases; the diapason of human feelings bewas accustomed to illumine the public dul-gins and ends on the same note. ness, will, perhaps, be surprised to learn

With this prelude our readers may set that his more deliberate genius was mainly themselves to "The Dream of Eugene conversant with the gloomy and terrible; Aram," which stands the first poem in the it is there that Hood showed his real mas-collection. The murderous tutor records tery. Yet, after all, reflective readers will his own nightmare to one of his pupils :— not see any absolute novelty in this combination, though it be not often witnessed." Not to speak of instances that readily suggest themselves in poetical history, a curious analogy is furnished by a sister art; for the natural analogies of the different spheres of Art are innumerable; the same imaginative faculty speaks in them all," Away they sped with gamesome minds, though it speak different languages. Con

"Twas in the prime of summer time,
An evening calm and cool,
And four-and-twenty happy boys
There were some that ran and some that leapt,
Came bounding out of school:
Like troutlets in a pool.

To a level mead they came, and there

And souls untouched by sin;

They drave the wickets in :
Pleasantly shone the setting sun
Over the town of Lynn.

"Like sportive deer they cours'd about,
And shouted as they ran-
Turning to mirth all things of earth,
As only boyhood can:
But the Usher sat remote from all,
A melancholy man !

sider, then, the Gothic Architecture. There
we see, in a palmary instance, how kin-
dred are the grand and the grotesque-how
the curious extravagance of detail is quite
compatible with awfulness of general effect,
and even blends with it in heightening har-
mony. Those hideous gurgoyles-those
monsters that grin in everlasting stone, un-
couth as if the old bloody idolatry had left
its traces in the majestic faith that sup-"His hat was off, his vest apart,
planted it, and the grim genius of Thor
and Odin would not be wholly cast out
from even the Christian temples of the
Teuton; how does this deformity mingle
with no unpleasing discord in the visible
music of these great creations of mediæval
art! how does the impassive, immutable
ugliness of these forms-hard and horrible
as Fate-help out the complete impression
of stern, resistless power that speaks in the
whole mighty edifice! There is, then, no
essential disconnection between the quaint
and the terrible-rather some deep internal
sympathy, when the former is kept within
its due limits as an accessory. We see
them again in close combination, in the
supernaturalisms of popular romance in the
same regions where Gothic architecture

To catch heaven's blessed breeze :

For a burning thought was in his brow,

And his bosom ill at ease:

So he lean'd his head on his hands, and read
The book between his knees!

"Leaf after leaf he turn'd it o'er,

Nor ever glanc'd aside,
For the peace of his soul he read that book
Much study had made him very lean,
In the golden eventide :
And pale, and leaden-ey'd.
"At last he shut the ponderous tome,
He strain'd the dusky covers close,
With a fast and fervent grasp

And fix'd the brazen hasp:
'Oh, God! could I so close my mind,
And clasp it with a clasp !'
Then leaping on his feet upright,
Some moody turns he took-