It was a childish ignorance, But now 'tis little joy To know I'm farther off from heav'n Already I have instanced enough admirable verse to make a reputation; and how much I have omitted! But, at all events, I must not pass by Ruth, as she stands breast high amid the corn, Clasp'd by the golden light of morn, Who many a glowing kiss had won; 8 or fair Ines, who has gone into the West, To dazzle when the sun is down, And rob the world of rest; She took our daylight with her, With morning blushes on her cheek or the all-sufficient love-song: 9 I love thee-I love thee! The blessing when I pray : I love thee-I love thee! Everywhere still, throughout the two sister volumes, the reader is sure to come upon lines, phrases, which will not consent to be forgotten. Even in that ugliest of poems with greatness in them, The Last Man, which fascinates without delighting, there is a redeeming spark of pathosthe confession of loneliness by the survivor of human kind, a hangman, who, to be sole heir of the earth, had just strung up his solitary companion, a beggar man: If the veriest cur would lick my hand, I could love it like a child! 11 So, again, the humour of the tale of Miss Kilmansegg leaves space for a grim individual pitifulness : Gold, still gold! hard, yellow, and cold For gold she had lived, and she died for gold! 12 At any instant a figure suddenly will start forth, with an appeal to the heart, at once entirely natural and entirely original; the outcast, on the river bank, in glaring London, with its clothed, fed, and sheltered millions, as the swarm waiting for the Casual Ward to open; sempstress, artisan, whole families; Lycus, the centaur that had been man, when the unsuspecting boy insults his shame at his bestial shape with a handful of grass, and, in anger at its rejection, pelts him with stones : I felt not, whose fate Was to meet more distress in his love than his hate; 15 the fisherman in his storm-tost boat on the lee-shore : Oh, God! to think Man ever and the hard-tried poet himself, with his birthday wish for his daughter, of all the bliss that life endears, 6 Not without smiles, nor yet from tears' Too strictly kept.17 None has ever more entirely possessed the secret of sudden ascents; sudden heart-kindlings. In some sort all the Serious Poems are examples; but we never can tell when Hood may not move to tears in a piece where the moment before he had been jesting: There is no music in the life That sounds with idiot laughter solely; Doubtless, in compensation, after the manner of poets, with rare exceptions, such as Keats and Gray, he sinks now and again; is eccentric without being original, tedious without being solemn. He can wear a sentiment threadbare, as in The Lady's Dream, and The Lay of the Labourer. His endless fancies can cloy, though in such a garden of dainty devices as The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies. He can be, though very seldom, merely dull, as in The Two Peacocks of Bedfont. He can smother Hellenic roses, as in Hero and Leander, in a thicket, however fragrant, of mediaeval embellishments. He can call a pamphlet an Ode, as his epistle to Rae Wilson, and spoil a charming sonnet with a poor pun. But measure the good against the ill; and the failures are nowhere. As a boy I heard nothing of Hood as a poet, much of him as a humorist. The Song of the Shirt surprised my little world without persuading it that it had to worship a poet the more. During my undergraduate days I first learnt to appreciate his poetry; and I have read and admired it ever since. Not the less, when recently I surveyed it as a whole, I stood amazed. The melody, the tenderness, and sympathy, the fancy, I find inexhaustible. Above all, is the unexpectedness. When I have believed I had explored all the singer's resources, he has touched a fresh cell in brain or heart, and music, echoing from the far distance, has set it thrilling. I can conjecture no explanation of Hood's absence from the first class of British poetry, unless that he himself never clearly made up his mind to demand entrance. He preferred to hover outside, and sing as he listed. I do not dare to pretend to overrule his choice for himself, accepted, as apparently it has been, by the common arbiters of public opinion. In any case, whatever the view of his own place, it is impossible to question the rank of a numerous chorus of bright creatures of his imagination. Poems (Serious), by Thomas Hood. Fourth edition. E. Moxon, 1851. Poems of Wit and Humour, by Thomas Hood. Fifth edition. E. Moxon, 1853. 1 The Song of the Shirt (Serious Poems), stanzas 9-10. 2 The Dream of Eugene Aram, st. 36 (ibid.). 3 The Haunted House, Part III, stanzas 27-8 (ibid.). The Forge: A Romance of the Iron Age, Part II, stanzas 12-13 (Poems of Wit and Humour). 5 The Death-bed (Serious Poems). "To a Child, Embracing His Mother, stanzas 1-3 (ibid.). I Remember, I Remember (ibid.). Ruth, st. 1 (ibid.). 9 Fair Ines, st. 1 (ibid.). 11 The Last Man, st. 35 (Poems of Wit and Humour). 12 Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg-Her Death, st. 16 (Serious Poems). 13 The Bridge of Sighs, st. 11 (ibid.). 14 The Workhouse Clock: An Allegory (ibid.). 15 Lycus the Centaur (ibid.). 16 The Lee-shore, st. 6 (ibid.). 17 To my Daughter on her Birthday, st. 3 (ibid.). 18 Ode to Melancholy (ibid.). ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING 1806-1861 Of the kind the foremost writer of English poetry-but a poetess. Or shall I, changing one word, say—and a poetess? For, with beauty everywhere, and womanliness as ubiquitous, I do not presume to decide on the independence one of the other. Women-writers now and then, like George Sand and George Eliot, if not Currer Bell, have dissembled their sex. Either they have disdained allowances for it; or they have distrusted the superiority of the other to prejudice. Mrs. Browning had none of that affectation, or apprehension. On the contrary, she may be said to have gloried in being a woman. In any case her verse would have proclaimed the fact. None but a woman-or perhaps a woman immured for a large part of her life in two rooms-could have imagined the repulse of a lover beloved, as in Insufficiency,1 and the martyr's cry of Denial !— I love thee not, I dare not love thee! go In silence; drop my hand. If thou seek roses, seek them where they blow In garden-alleys, not in desert sand. Can life and death agree, That thou shouldst stoop thy song to my complaint? Look in my face and see.2 The splendid unreason of Duchess May, the self-devotion to death of the Crusader's bride-page, and the sweet absurdities, not to be read by any male person without a blush, of |