"Heavily I rose up, as soon As light was in the sky, "Merrily rose the lark, and shook For I was stooping once again Under the horrid thing! "With breathless speed, like a soul in chase, I took him up and ran; There was no time to dig a grave Before the day began: In a lonesome wood with heaps of leaves, "And all that day I read in school, But my thought was other where: And a mighty wind had swept the leaves, Those who have fittingly read this impressive ballad, will admit that a spark of the old Macbeth inspiration was not wholly wanting to its author. ous by those small details which give reality to fancy, as well as of his command of a very original and expressive poetic dialect. The poem is too long to quote the entire. It has little or nothing of human incident, but embodies, with wonderful force, the vague impressions of awe that belong to old deserted mansions. "With shatter'd panes the grassy court was starr'd: The time-worn coping-stone had tumbled after; And through the ragged roof the sky shone, barr'd With naked beam and rafter. “O'er all there hung a shadow and a fear; "The flow'r grew wild and rankly as the weed, Roses with thistles struggled for espial, And vagrant plants of parasitic breed "But gay or gloomy, steadfast or infirm, No heart was there to heed the hour's duration; All times and tides were lost in one long term Of stagnant desolation. "Howbeit, the door I pushed-or so I dreamedWhich slowly, slowly gaped—the hinges creaking With such a rusty eloquence, it seemed "But Time was dumb within that mansion old, "Those tattered flags, that with the opened door, Seem'd the old wave of battle to remember, While fallen fragments danced upon the floor Like dead leaves in December. "The startled bats flew out, bird after bird- "A shriek that echoed from the joisted roof And when the visitor ascends" the gloomy stairs and lonely :" "Those gloomy stairs, so dark, and damp, and cold, With odors as from bones and relics carnal, The Haunted House" is even more characteristic of Hood's talent for heightening the undefined sense of the mysteri- Of ev'ry step so many echoes blended, "Those dreary stairs, where with the sounding stress The mind, with dark misgivings, fear'd to guess gem of perfect purity-this crystallized How many feet ascended;" tear: "One more unfortunate, Weary of breath, Rashly importunate, Gone to her death! "Take her up tenderly, "Look at her garments "Touch her not scornfully; "Make no deep scrutiny Rash and undutiful: "Still, for all slips of hers, "Loop up her tresses "Who was her father? Who was her mother? Had she a brother? Or was there a dearer one Still, and a nearer one "Alas! for the rarity "Sisterly, brotherly, "Where the lamps quiver So far in the river, With many a light From window and casement, "The bleak wind of March Made her tremble and shiver; But not the dark arch, Or the black flowing river: "In she plunged boldly, "Take her up tenderly, Lift her with care; Fashion'd so slenderly, Young, and so fair! "Ere her limbs frigidly Smooth and compose them; "Dreadfully staring "Perishing gloomily, Cross her hands humbly, 66 Owning her weakness, Her evil behaviour, And leaving, with meekness, To what we have now transcribed, and to the still more celebrated 66 Song of the Shirt," which succeeds it, belongs the solemn praise of tending to truly better mankind, of chastening and exalting the tone of public feeling in matters, homely indeed, but on that very account of every-day interest and importance. The pulpit can do much; the poet can at times do more; his audience is less limited; he can appeal to some feelings to which the pulpit can scarcely address itself, without hazarding its necessary dignity; he gains access among those on whom religious appeals have unfortunately little influence; and his moral medicine is administered (if the physician be indeed a master of his healing art) in forms at once more pleasing and more condensed. You will not readily forget that Bridge of Sighs," and its poor victim; "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;" and when next misery of that class appeals to your compassion, or vice in that department would proffer its temptations, the work of a higher power may be aided by the picture a true poet has just unveiled to your fancy. Indeed it is a very happy thing for Hood's many friends to think that the impulse which created those exquisite things cannot have passed unnoticed or unrecorded by the Dispenser of everlasting recompense; and that they may in humble hope rejoice that one who thus, in his own department, helped to carry on the great divine work of human amelioration (and how many temptations had a genius so sensitive to all absurdity to turn traitor to the cause of mankind, and sour into the profitless disheartening scoffer!) is now in a world where such labors are not forgotten. The effect produced by the famous "Song of the Shirt" (as in his own quaint spirit of parody he styled and moulded that thrilling appeal on behalf of female poverty and wretchedness) few of us can forget. It shook the public heart to the core. We trust that stirring of the waters has not subsided; that the charity it aided to arouse and to fortify is still busy and unrelaxing in its generous efforts to alleviate surely the most miserable and inhuman bondage-the more miserable because overlooked, and therefore uncompassionated -that the dread of hunger and of nakedness ever forced its victims to endure. "O! Men, with Sisters dear! O! Men, with Mothers and Wives! It is not linen you're wearing ou', But human creatures' lives! Stitch-stich--stitch, In poverty, hunger, and dirt, Sewing at once, with a double thread, A Shroud as well as a Shirt. "But why do I talk of Death? That phantom of grizly bone, I hardly fear his terrible shape, It seems so like my ownIt seems so like my own, Because of the fasts I keep, Oh! God! that bread should be so dear, And flesh and blood so cheap!" But we had best pause at once, or we should be won to insert the whole. Buy the book itself, fair daughter of fashion, or borrow it from some accommodating neighbor, in order patiently to transcribe those eleven stanzas in the clearest of Italian hands, and learn, as you ponder their melancholy meanings, to look tenderly on your woe-worn sister, and reflect, that even for your own gentler sex, life-the very spring-time of its years has other scenes than the evening salon and the morning fête. Alas! these poor slaves of the toilet are the very Helots of haughty Fashion; the basis of its gorgeous structures are laid in these unseen, untold miseries; the bright consummate flower of the ball-room parterre has grown from this tear-bedewed root; not a fold in the crêpe lisse of that exquisite drapery-in the point lace of those irresistible flounces-in the tulle illusion (most imaginative of textures!*) of those graceful. skirts-in the golden blonde of that inimitable berthe-but has been the creation of weary vigils and fevered pulses. Hamlet, "considering it too curiously," might raise strange sermons on this topic. A The same lesson is pressed forcibly by our poet in another of these touching compositions, the "Lady's Dream." In the dread midnight the vision of all the unmarked sorrows of the working world *The poetry of Parisian millinery has never yet obtained its due praises as one of the great departments of æsthetical science. How bold, for example, is the figure, when silks are described as "d'un veritable couleur de succés!" The fancy of a new Parisian bonnet was objected to by a fair purchaser: "Madame," was the reply of indignant genius, " parole d'honneur, il m'a couté trois nuits d'insomnie pour l'imaginer!" Still better was the solemn "not at home" of the porter of one of the greater artists-" Monsieur n'est pas visible, il compose!" "At last, before that door Oh! that the parish powers, And go, for once, by that older one no one can well deny the fact embodied in the following lines, and the legitimacy of the application as long as it is urged to the enforcement of individual humility and uni "Gifted with noble tendency to climb, rings; A moral not unlike the bearing of these, is contained in the strange extravaganza of "Miss Kilmansegg," which occupies nearly half of the first of these volumes. The fiction is scarcely a happy one; but the ex-versal charity: : ecution is, in some parts, admirable, and there is a sort of droll pathos in the fate of the unfortunate heiress, scurvily treated by her magnificent count, and slain at last by the symbol and instrument of her own wealth. The ode to Mr. Rae Wilson, full of witty retort, has the disadvantage of treading upon the most delicate and dangerous of all the fields of satire. Mr. Wilson had been pleased to comment somewhat severely upon an innocent expression of our Thomas the Rhymer, and the wit takes ample vengeance on the critic, and in him on-as he considers-all the exhibitors of ostentatious sanctity. "Man," declares Hood may pious texts repeat, And yet religion have no inward seat; nearest stem with tendril And as the climate and the soil may grant, We pass on, however, without much delay from this branch of our task of criticism. The light-armed troops of wit and humor, powerful as they are at times to scatter the pompous columns of sanctimonious pretence, are seldom a perfectly safe auxiliary to the cause of sincere religion. They are Swiss, "who fight for any God or Wit has no time and no solicitude man." to make distinctions; and those who most enjoy its sallies are usually just as little inenact-clined to do so. Hence it is constantly Again, on Sir Andrew Agnew's Sabbath "Spontaneously to God should tend the soul, Fresh from St. Andrew's College, He declares that he abhors the partiality of schemes "That frown upon St. Giles' sins, but blink The peccadilloes of all Piccadilly;" as if "the rich by easy trips May go to heaven, whereas the poor and Towly Must work their passage, as they do in ships." Neither is the angry bard needlessly complimentary to Mr, Wilson, in his character of Oriental Traveller : "You have been to Palestine-alas! made to do a work its authors never intended; and Tartuffe and Hudibras are formed into standing arsenals of artillery against sincere profession no less than false. While the very connexion of ludicrous associations with even corruptions and spurious imitations of religion cannot be easily severed from religion in its purity and truth; the very language of hypocrisy and sincerity must, from the nature of the case, be the same; and the ridicule that is blended with that phraseology in its false, will adhere to it in its upright use. Men are unconsciously betrayed to pass the shifting barrier that divides them. The warfare against hypocrisy becomes thus too often a discipline for the warfare against sincere belief; the laughter which derides superstition saps the bulwarks that defend against infidelity. Like the dragon fight of the knight in Schiller, the assailants are trained upon the false to attack the true. We are not sorry to see our man of pun and poesy safe out of this dangerous re Some minds improve by travel, others, gion. rather Resemble copper wire, or brass, Which gets the narrower by going farther!" The argument is capable of being dangerously and extravagantly misapplied: but For Hood's gift as a poet of pure fancy -a dreamer in the visionary world of flowers and fairies or in that ideal elder world of Greek mythological heroism near akin to it, the reader may be referred to |