The bulk of his production is expressed with the same levity which strikes the ear, as in the verses just quoted. He was unquestionably the greatest trafficker in words of double meaning the world had ever known. His stock was exhaustless, and whether home-made or far-fetched, his mots and jeux were sure of currency.
The secret of the perpetual playfulness of his pen is to be found in the eagerness of the public mind to be moved to mirth, and in his need to minister to the mood of the public mind. In a word, he was dependent upon his brain for his bread. Labor was his law, and so, as it befel, humor and mirth became his profits. His puns (so easily spun from himself,) were transmuted into pence and pounds. His quips looked quaintly ahead to quarter-day. His grotesque metaphors were sold in the street, like plaster images, for a livelihood. Had he been less under constraint to please the public ear, he would have wrought, perchance, one dull epic, instead of a thousand delicious epigrams.
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His writings are indeed light, but in a double sense. They are light with the buoyancy of the zephyr or of the gossamer wafted in its bosom. They are light also with the luminousness of the sun-beam, kindling beauty and light and warmth as it flashes along its track. The writings of Hood are to be laughed at, but they who only laugh at them have no true appreciation of their subtle power. They disparage them for their mirthfulness, because they can not discover the depths below the dimpling surface of their rolling humor.
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His description of a November fog, in London, must be familiar to man y of you, but I will venture to quote it in illustration of his facility in rhyming, and also of his skill in supplying the details of a picture which is all painted only in shadows. It is entitled,
“NOVEMBER.”
No sun—no moon—
No morn—no noon,—
No dawn—no dark—no proper time of day,—