That's the prose of Love in a Cottage,

A puny, naked, shivering wretch,

The whole of whose birthright would not fetch, Though Robins himself drew up the sketch, The bid of a mess of pottage.

Whilst Margaret, charmed by the Bulbul rare,
In a garden of Gul reposes,

Poor Peggy hawks nosegays from street to street,
Till-think of that! who find life so sweet! -
She hates the smell of roses!

"Not so with the infant Kilmansegg!
She was not born to steal or beg,
Or gather cresses in ditches;
To plait the straw, or bind the shoe,
Or sit all day to hem and sew,
As women must - and not a few-

To fill their insides with stitches!

"She was not doomed for bread to eat,
To be put to her hands as well as her feet,
To carry home linen from mangles,

Or heavy-hearted and weary-limbed,
To dance on a rope in a jacket trimm'd
With as many blows as spangles.

"She was one of those who by Fortune's boon
Are born, as they say, with a silver spoon
In her mouth, not a wooden ladle:

To speak according to poet's wont,
Plutus as sponsor stood at her font,
And Midas rocked the cradle.

"At her first debut she found her head
On a pillow of down, in a downy bed,
With a damask canopy over.

"Her very first draught of vital air
It was not the common chameleon fare
Of plebeian lungs and noses.

No her earliest sniff

Of this world was a whiff

Of the genuine Ottar of Roses!"

Immediate success was important to Hood, and his originality being most apparent in the humorous and grotesque, he sought popularity in the gayeties of mirth and fancy. He has, however, given us verses in a grave, lofty, and sustained style, purely poetical and imaginative, and rich and musical enough in diction to recall some of the finest flights of the Elizabethan poets, as in these stanzas from his admirable ode entitled "Autumn."

"The squirrel gloats on his accomplished hoard,

The ants have brimmed their garners with ripe grain,
And honey-bees have stored

The sweets of summer in their luscious cells;
The swallows all have winged across the main;
But here the Autumn melancholy dwells,
And sighs her tearful spells

Among the sunless shadows of the plain.
Alone, alone,

Upon a mossy stone,

She sits and reckons up the dead and gone,
With the last leaves for a rosary,

Whilst all the withered world looks drearily,
Like a dim picture of the drowned past
In the hushed mind's mysterious far away,
Doubtful what ghastly thing will steal the last
Into that distance, gray upon the gray.

"O go and sit with her, and be o'ershaded
Under the languid downfall of her hair:
She wears a coronal of flowers faded
Upon her forehead, and a face of care; —
There is enough of withered everywhere
To make her bower, and enough of gloom;
There is enough of sadness to invite,

If only for the rose that died,-whose doom
Is Beauty's."

Hood has written but few sonnets, yet enough, I think, to display his mastery over that form of poetic composition, as in this:

"Love, dearest Lady, such as I would speak,
Lives not within the humor of the eye,-

Not being but an outward phantasy,

That skims the surface of a tinted cheek

Else it would wane with beauty, and grow weak,

As if the rose made summer, and so lie

Amongst the perishable things that die,
Unlike the love which I would give and seek
Whose health is of no hue-to feel decay

With cheeks' decay, that have a rosy prime,
Love is its own great loveliness alway,
And takes new lustre from the touch of time;
Its bough owns no December, and no May,
But bears its blossom into winter's clime."

The poem on the story of "Eugene Aram" first manifested the full extent of that poetical vigor which advanced as the health of the poet declined. From a sick bed, from which he never rose, Hood conducted with marvellous energy the magazine which he had started in his own name; and there he composed those two poems which have taken their place among the

the "Song of the Shirt," and the "Bridge of Sighs." In these wonderful poems Hood has taken homely, prosaic human interests from the low level of fact, and lifting them to the skyey region of imagination, has hung them

masterly "pictures rich and rare"- where they appeal eternally to the human heart. "The Bridge of Sighs" combines eloquence and poetry with a metrical energy scarcely excelled in our language; and hardened indeed must be the heart that can read it and still look with "Levite eyes" on the slipping sinners "of Eve's family." Though the use of the sewing-machine may have impaired the literal pathos of that "stitch, stitch, stitch" in the "Song of the Shirt," we must still wear our tucks and furbelows and exquisitely made shirts with a sad consciousness that "all this white satin" has not been put within ordinary reach without its proximate wear of "flesh and blood."

It is perhaps to be regretted that an author possessing

such undoubted command over the passions and emotions as has been displayed by Hood in "Eugene Aram," "The Song of the Shirt," and "The Bridge of Sighs," should have given us so little in this vein; yet even in his puns and jests there is always a savor of good. They are entirely free from that grossness and vulgarity which unhappily abounds in the compositions of many humorists of our day. Hood's satire is without a spark of personal malice; there is always in him an under-current of beautiful Christian humanity; and as has been observed, "those who come to laugh at folly remain to sympathize with want and suffering." Among his lofty and graver productions are many fine and finished poems that may compare with the very best in our literature; as the "Ode to Autumn," "The Haunted House," "The Death-Bed," and "I remember, I remember." His "Fair Inez" is one of our finest poems. This sonnet is good enough to have been the work of Shakespeare himself:

"It is not death that sometimes in a sigh

This eloquent breath shall take its speechless flight;
That sometime these bright stars, that now reply
In sunlight to the sun, shall set in night;
That this warm conscious flesh shall perish quite,
And all life's ruddy springs forget to flow;

That thought shall cease, and the immortal sprite
Be lapp'd in alien clay and laid below;

It is not death to know this, but to know
That pious thoughts, which visit at new graves

In tender pilgrimage, will cease to go

So duly and so oft; and when grass waves
Over the past-away, there may be then

No resurrection in the minds of men."

Let these stanzas from our own Lowell's beautiful tribute to Hood's memory assure us that the "resurrection in