their mistakes; and, in an age which has seen the steam of a tea-kettle applied to change the physical aspect of the earth, all have unbounded faith in the mightier miracles of moral and political revolution which the mirth of an English fireside is yet to effect when properly condensed and pointed. We rather honour the motives than share in the anticipations of this witty and brilliant band. Much good they have done and are doing; but the full case is beyond them. It is in mechanism, after all, not in magic, that they trust. We, on the other hand, have had more hope in the double-divine charm which Genius and Religion, fully wedded together, are yet to wield; when, in a high sense, the words of the poet shall be accomplished '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 Mirabeau'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 toil, in a shady nook of the playground, and to a little boy. What a ghastly contrast do all these peaceful images present to the tale he tells, in its mixture of homely horror and shadowy dread! What an ear this in which to inject the fell revelation! In what a plain yet powerful setting is the awful picture thus inserted! And how perfect at once the keeping and the contrast between youthful innocence and guilt, grey-haired before its time!between the eager, unsuspecting curiosity of the listener, and the slow and difficult throes by which the narrator relieves himself of his burden of years!-between the sympathetic, half-pleasant, half-painful shudder of the boy, and the strong convulsion of the man! The Giaour, emptying his polluted 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 shrick 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, seizes on that moment in Aram's history 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 And here, how much of the horror is 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." 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-grave, forgetfulness, perhaps forgiveness. "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. 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 So Hood into the centre of this trae 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, her stitches, her bones-too transparent by far through the sallow skin-sees that though degraded she is a woman still; and rising up, swears by Him that liveth for ever and ever, that he will make her wrongs and wretchedness known to the limits of the country and of the race. He echoes her voice-and hark! how, to that cracked tuneless voice, trembling under its burden of sorrow, now shrunk down into the whispers of weakness, and The 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 best way to show it in the lurid light of mirth; that there is a sorrow too deep for tears, too deep for sighs, but none too deep for smiles; and that the aside and the laughter of an idiot might accompany and serve to aggravate the anguish of a god. And what tragedy in that swallow's back which "twits with the spring" this captive without crime, this suicide without intention, this martyr without the prospect of a fiery chariot! 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 "Edin- that he lived to_pun. This, however, burgh 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, Nor the black flowing river; 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 mnade 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, 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 family of mirth!) should be witnessed again on earth! ce "Comic Annuals" there mark the still procession of the years? The death of a Alas! poor Yorick. Where now thy humorist, as the first serious epoch in his squibs!thy quiddities? - thy flashes history, is a very sad event. In Hood's that wont to set the table in a roar? case, however, we have this consolation: Quite chopfallen ?" The death of a man a mere humorist he was not, but a sinof mirth has to us a drearier significance cere lover of his race-a hearty friend to than that of a more sombre spirit. He their freedom and welfare-a deep sympasses into the other world as into a re-pathiser with their sufferings and sorrows; gion where his heart had been translated and, if he did not to the full consecrate long before. To death, as to a nobler his high faculties to their service, surely birth, had he looked forward; and when his circumstances as much as himself it comes his spirit readily and cheerfully were to blame. Writing, as we are, in yields to it, as one great thought in the Dundee, where he spent some of his soul submits to be displaced and dark- early days, and which never ceased to ened by a greater. To him death had possess associations of interest to his lost its terrors, at the same time that mind; and owing, as we do, to him a life had lost its charms. But " can a debt of much pleasure, and of some feelghost laugh or shake his gaunt sides?"-ings higher still, we cannot but take leave is there wit any more than wisdom in the of his writings with every sentiment of adgrave?-do puns there crackle?-or do miration and gratitude. ROBERT POLLOK. OUR readers are aware that there once taking up one of our old hymn-books, existed a strong prejudice against what and comparing it, in its pert jingle and was called religious poetry. The causes impudent familiarities, to the "strains of this feeling were long to tell and weari- which once did sweet in Zion glide," to some to trace. Not the least of them was our own rough but manly version of the the authority of Dr Johnson, who, though Psalms, or to the later hymns of Cowper enamoured of the sanctimonious stupidity and Montgomery. It is like a twopenny of Blackmore, had yet an inveterate pre- trump, or a musical snuff-box, beside the judice against religious poetry per se, and lyre of David, or the organ of Isaiah. was at the pains to enshrine this "folly And just when the splendid success of of the wise" in some of the tersest and Cowper, Montgomery, and others, had most energetic sentences which ever wiped out this bad impression of redropped from his authoritative pen. An- ligious poetry, and when the oracular other cause lay, we think, in the supreme dogma of the lexicographer was dying badness of the greater part of the soi- into echo, a new source of prejudice was disant poetry which professed to be opened in the uprise of a set of prereligious. Lumbering versions of the tended pious poets, or poetasters—who winged words of inspired men of God-approaching the horns of the altar, not verses steeped in maudlin sentiment, only held, but tugged with all their when not touched into convulsive life by might-who treated divine things with fanaticism-hymns, how different from the utmost coolness of familiarity-rushthose of Milton or of the Catholic li- ing within the hallowed circle of Scriptany, full of sickly unction, or of babyish ture truth to snatch a selfish excitement prattle;-such was, during the eighteenth-passing their own tame thoughts across century, the staple of our sacred song. the flame of the sanctuary, if they might If any one thinks our statement over- thus kindle them into life; and doing all charged, let him put it to the test, by in their power to render the great little, the reverend ridiculous, and the divine mental training, or even formed the first disgusting. These mock Miltons, though vague dream of a magnum opus, his was they had established a railway communi- resolved, revolved, rolled over in his mind cation with the lower regions, and took for years, written, re-written, published, monthly "Descents into hell," were quite praised, and the author himself was intimate with the angel Gabriel, and away! Was not this much? And whatconflagrated the creation as coolly as you ever malignity may say or "shriek,” the would set up a rocket-made no very mere unbounded and unequalled podeep impression upon the public mind. pularity of the book does prove a little Dismay and disgust, dying into laughter, more. We, indeed, look upon the ninewere the abiding feeling with which they teenth century as a very young century were regarded. And we know no better in the world's history-as but a babe in proof of Robert Pollok's essential su- leading-strings. Still we do not think periority, than the fact, that his poem, so little of it, after all, as to deem that amid the general nausea of such things, a tissue of wordy worthlessness would has retained its place; that the sins of run like wildfire-pass through some his imitators have not been visited on his head; and that, while their tiny tapers have been all eclipsed, his solemn star shines on undimmed, reminding us, in its sombre splendour, of Mars, that dark red hermit of the heavens. k score of editions in less than eighteen years, and take its place, if not with the "Paradise Lost," with which it ought never to be named, yet certainly near the "Grave" and the "Night Thoughts." Let those who, in the face of the general estimate of a tolerably enlightened public, In examining Pollok's character as a deny the "Course of Time" any merit, poet, we are greatly helped by the com- be, as De Quincey says on another ocpact unity of his actual achievement. casion, 'choked with their own bile!" When we speak of Pollok, we mean the There were, indeed, we admit, certain "Course of Time." He did not, like circumstances which, in some measure, many of greater mark, fritter down his explained the popularity of the poem powers in fugitive effusions. He is not apart altogether from its intrinsic merit. remembered or forgotten as the author First of all, it was a religious poem, and of literary remains, occasional essays, or this at once awakened a wide and warm posthumous fragments. He has incon- interest in its favour. Galled by the testably written a book aspiring to com- godless ridicule of Byron, and chagrined pleteness, of proud pretensions, hewn out by what they thought the vague and of the quarry of his own soul, begun mystic piety of the Lakers, the religious early, prosecuted with heroic persever- community hailed the appearance of a ance, and cemented by his own life's- new and true poet, who was ashamed of blood. Whatever we may think of the none of the peculiarities of one of the design or the execution, of the taste or straitest of all their sects, with a tuthe style, honour to the man who, in mult of applause. It was besides, a poem this age of fragments, and fractions of by a Dissenter. And between the gentle fragments, and first drafts, and tentative but timid genius of Michael Bruce, and and tantalising experiments, has written the far more energetic song of Pollok, no an undeniable book! Nor let us forget poetry deserving the name had been prothe age of the writer. The fact, that duced among them. It was natural, a youth so impressed, by one effort of therefore, that when, at length, a brilhis mind, many, who were not straight- liant star broke forth in their firmament, way deemed insane, as to draw forth the they should salute its arrival with lawdaring of equalling him with Milton, and ful and general pride. A few, indeed, of his work with "Paradise Lost," speaks the more malignant of those who found much in its favour. Ere the majority themselves eclipsed, felt hatred, and preof educated men have completed their tended to feel contempt, for the poem. |