The naked, also, that I might have clad, the famished I might

have fed!
The sorrow I might have soothed, and the unregarded tears ;
For many a thronging shape was there, from long-forgotten years,
Ay, even the poor rejected Moor who raised my children's fears !

The wounds I might have healed! the human sorrow and smart !
And yet it never was in my soul to play so ill a part :
But evil is wrought by want of thought, as well as want of heart !

An illustration of the effect of antithesis, and grotesqueness of fancy, we have in his Ode to his Son :

Thou happy, happy elf !
(But stop, first let me kiss away that tear-)

Thou tiny image of myself!
(My love, he's poking peas into his ear!)

Thou merry, laughing sprite !

With spirits feather-light,
Untouched by sorrow, and unsoiled by sin,-
(Good heavens! the child is swallowing a pin !)

Thou cherub-brat of earth!
Fit playfellow for fays, by moonlight pale,

In harmless sport and mirth!
(That dog will bite him, if he pulls its tail ;)

His Dame Eleanor Spearing, like his many other pieces, including Young Ben, Nelly Gray, and Ben Battle, exhibit his irresistible fond

ness for playing upon words. named :

Here is a passage from the first

She was deaf as 'a nail—that you cannot hammer

A meaning into, for all

your

clamour-
There never was such a deaf old Gammer!
Deaf to sounds, as a ship out of soundings,
Deaf to verbs, and all their compoundings,
Adjective, noun, and adverb, and particle,
Deaf to even the definite article-
No verbal message was worth a pin,
Though you hired an earwig to carry it in!
Of course the loss was a great privation,
For one of her sex—whatever her station-
And none the less that the Dame had a turn
For making ali families one concern,
And learning whatever there was to learn
In the prattling, tattling Village of Tringham-
As who wore silk ? and who wore gingham ?
And what the Atkins' shop might bring 'em ?
How the Smiths contrived to live? and whether
The fourteen Murphys all pigg’d together?
The wages per week of the Weavers and Skinners,
And what they boiled for their Sunday dinners ?

Was all a sealed book to Dame Eleanor Spearing ;

And often her tears would rise to their founts-
Supposing a little scandal at play
'Twixt Mrs. O'Fie and Mrs. Au Fait-

That she couldn't audit the Gossips' accounts.

The Dream of Eugene Aram has been regarded as one of Hood's finest productions ; but a high critical authority thinks his Haunted House bears the palm, it is so wonderfully full of creative power.

“ It required the finest mental apprehension, the white heat of
imagination, the most sensitive perception, to take such a picture
as this, wherein the indefinite is caught and fixed so definitely :-
a living, lonely human being is thus isolated and suspended betwixt
the spirit-world of the air overhead and the reptile-world of crum-
bling ruin at the feet :”1_

1

The centipede along the threshold crept,

The cobweb hung across in mazy tangle,
And in its winding-sheet the maggot slept,

At every nook and angle.
The keyhole lodged the earwig and her brood,

The emmets of the steps had old possession,
And marched in search of their diurnal food

In undisturbed procession.
Such omens in the place there seemed to be,
At
every

crooked turn, or on the landing,
The straining eye-ball was prepared to see

Some apparition standing !
The dreary stairs, where with the sounding stress

Of every step so many echoes blended,
The mind, with dark misgivings, feared to guess

How many feet ascended.

Even the ancestral portraits on the walls are filled with no mere simulated life,

Their souls were looking through their painted eyes

With awful speculation.

At the sound of the door creaking on its rusty hinges, it seems as though the murder would out at last. The screech-owl appears to “ mock the cry that she had heard some dying victim utter :"

A shriek that echoed from its joisted roof,

And up the stair, and further still and further, Till in some ringing chamber far aloof

It ceased its tale of murther !
The wood-louse dropped and rolled into a ball,

Touched by some impulse, occult or mechanic; And nameless beetles ran along the wall,

In universal panic.

The subtle spider, that from overhead

Hung like a spy on human guilt and error, Suddenly turned, and up its slender thread

Ran with a nimble terror.

Prophetic hints that filled the soul with dread,

But through one gloomy entrance pointing mostly,
The while some secret inspiration said,

“That chamber is the ghostly !”
Across the door no gossamer festoon

Swung pendulous,—no web, no dusty fringes,
No silky chrysalis or white cocoon,

About its nooks and hinges.
The spider shunned the interdicted room,

The moth, the beetle, and the fly were banished,
And where the sunbeam fell athwart the gloom,

The very midge had vanished.
One lonely ray that glanced upon a bed,

As if with awful aim direct and certain,
To show the Bloody Hand, in burning red,

Embroidered on the curtain.

Here is a sweet passage from The Fairies :

Oh, these be Fancy’s revellers by night!

Stealthy companions of the downy moth-
Diana's motes, that fit in her pale light,

Shunners of sunbeams in diurnal sloth :

These be the feasters on night's silver cloth, -
The
gnat,

with shrilly trump, is their convener,
Forth from their Aowery chambers, nothing loath,
With lulling tunes to charm the air serener,
Or dance upon the grass, to make it greener.

These be the pretty genii of the Aowers,

Daintily fed with honey and pure dew-
Midsummer's phantoms in her dreaming hours,

King Oberon, and all his merry crew,
The darling puppets of Romance's view;