This town boasted few books, and the accident which threw Hood's poems in the way of the watcher from the hill, was a very fortunate one. They afforded a true companionship to hours which knew no other, and, perhaps, have since been overrated from association with what they answered to or suggested.
Yet there are surely passages in them which ought to be generally known and highly prized. And if their highest value be for a few individuals with whom they are especially in concord, unlike the really great poems which bring something to all, yet those whom they please will be very much pleased.
Hood never became corrupted into a hack writer. This shows great strength under his circumstances. Dickens has fallen, and Sue is falling; for few men can sell themselves by inches without losing a cubit from their stature. But Hood resisted the danger. He never wrote when he had nothing to say, he stopped when he had done, and never hashed for a second meal old thoughts which had been drained of their choicest juices. His heart is truly human, tender, and brave. From the absurdities of human nature he argues the possibility of its perfection. His black is admirably contrasted with his white, but his love has no converse of hate. His descriptions of nature, if not accurately or profoundly evidencing insight, are unstudied, fond, and reverential. They are fine reveries about nature.
He has tried his powers on themes where he had great rivals—in the "Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," and "Hero and Leander." The latter is one of the finest subjects in the world, and one, too, which can never wear out as long as each mind shall have its separate ideal of what a meeting would be between two perfect lovers, in the full bloom of beauty and youth, under circumstances the most exalting to passion, because the most trying, and with the most romantic accompaniments of scenery. There is room here for the finest expression of love and grief, for the wildest remonstrance against fate. Why are they made so lovely and so beloved? Why was a flower brought to such perfection, and then culled for no use? One of the older English writers has written an exquisite poem on this subject, painting a youthful pair, fitted to be not only a heaven but a world to one another. Hood had not power to paint or conceive such fulness of character; but, in a lesser style, he has written a fine poem. The best part of it, however, is the innocent cruelty and grief of the Sea Siren.
"Lycus the Centaur" is also a poem once read never to be forgotten. The hasty trot of the versification, unfit for any other theme, on this betokens well the frightened horse. Its mazy and bewildered imagery, with its countless glancings and glimpses, expressed powerfully the working of the Circean spell, while the note of human sadness, a yearning and condemned human love, thrills through the whole and gives it unity.
The Sonnets, "It is not death," &c., and that on Silence, are equally admirable. Whoever reads these poems will regard Hood as something more than a great wit,—as a great poet also.
To express this is our present aim, and therefore we shall leave to others, or another time, the retrospect of his comic writings. But having, on the late promptings of love for the departed, looked over these, we have been especially amused with the "Schoolmistress Abroad," which was new to us. Miss Crane, a "she Mentor, stiff as starch, formal as a Dutch ledge, sensitive as a daguerreotype, and so tall, thin, and upright, that supposing the Tree of Knowledge to have been a poplar, she was the very Dryad to have fitted it," was left, with a sister little better endowed with the pliancy and power of adaptation which the exigencies of this varied world-scene demand, in attendance upon a sick father, in a foreign inn, where she cannot make herself understood, because her French is not "French French, but English French," and no two things in nature or art can be more unlike. Now look at the position of the sisters.
"The younger, Miss Ruth, was somewhat less disconcerted. She had by her position the greater share in the active duties of Lebanon House, and under ordinary circumstances would not have been utterly at a loss what to do for the comfort or relief of her parent. But in every direction in which her instinct and habits would have prompted her to look, the materials she sought were deficient. There was no easy chair—no fire to wheel it to—no cushion to shake up—no cupboard to go to—no female friend to consult—no Miss Parfitt—no cook—no John to send for the doctor—no English—no French—nothing but that dreadful 'Gefullig,' or 'Ja Wohl,' and the equally incomprehensible 'Gnadige Frau!'
"'Der herr,' said the German coachman, 'ist sehr krank,' (the gentleman is very sick.)
"The last word had occurred so frequently on the organ of the Schoolmistress, that it had acquired in her mind some important significance.