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It was not strange I saw no good in man,
To overbalance all the wear and waste
Of faculties, displayed in vain, but born
To prosper in some better sphere: and why?
In my own heart love had not been made wise
To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind,
To know even hate is but a mask of love's,
To see a good in evil, and a hope

In ill-success; to sympathize, be proud
Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim
Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies,
Their prejudice, and fears, and cares, and doubts;
Which all touch upon nobleness, despite
Their error, all tend upwardly though weak,
Like plants in mines which never saw the sun,
But dream of him, and guess where he may be,
And do their best to climb and get to him.
All this I knew not, and I failed. Let men
Regard me, and the poet dead long ago

Who once loved rashly; and shape forth a third,
And better-tempered spirit, warned by both :
As from the over-radiant star too mad

To drink the light-springs, beamless thence itself-
And the dark orb which borders the abyss,
Ingulfed in icy night,-might have its course
A temperate and equi-distant world.

Meanwhile, I have done well, though not all well.
As yet men cannot do without contempt-
'Tis for their good, and therefore fit awhile
That they reject the weak, and scorn the false,
Rather than praise the strong and true, in me.
But, after, they will know me! If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,

It is but for a time; I press God's lamp
Close to my breast-its splendour, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day!

And thus the finished music of the poem returns to the same note from which it had sprung up on its grand parabolic sweep, and the self-willed and daring but always noble as well as brilliant visionary to the words with which he had broken away long ago from his two friends Festus and Michal :

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If there be a fourth name belonging to this period, the middle portion of the present century, which after-times will recognize as that of a poet of the first class, it is that of the late Thomas Hood. No one of his contemporaries has surpassed him either in perfection of workmanship or in originality of conception. Upon whatever he has written he has stamped the impress of himself, and as with a diamond signet. Nor, although his most distinctive manner is comic, is he at all inferior to himself when he adopts a different style, as he has done in several of his best-known poems. As in other instances, indeed,-for example, in Horace and in Burns—what gives their peculiar character and charm to his most pathetic touches is essentially the same thing which makes the brilliancy of his comic manner. All that is most characteristic of him in expression and thought is to be discerned in the curious felicity of the following exquisitely beautiful and tender lines:

We watched her breathing through the night,

Her breathing soft and low,

As in her breast the wave of life
Kept heaving to and fro.

So silently we seemed to speak,

So slowly moved about,

As we had lent her half our powers
To eke her living out.

Our very hopes belied our fears,
Our fears our hopes belied-

We thought her dying when she slept,
And sleeping when she died.

For when the morn came dim and sad,
And chill with early showers,
Her quiet eyelids closed-she had
Another morn than ours.

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Denham, Sir John, 288

Donne, Dr. John, 254, 27

Dorset, Earl of, vide Sackville, T.

Douglas, Gawin, 195

Drama, end of the old, 280
Drama, the regular, 200

Dramatists of Eighteenth Century, 369, 396
Dramatists of Seventeenth Century, 331
Drayton, Michael, 246
Drummond, Sir William, 253

Dryden, John, 328

Dunbar, William, 196

Dyer, John, 371

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Hall, Joseph, 249
Harington, Sir John, 252
Harrington, Sir James, 308
Hawes, Stephen, 191
Henry the Minstrel, 179
Henryson, Robert, 179
Herbert, George, 283
Herrick, Robert, 284
Heywood, John, 194, 202
Historical Writers, 278
Hobbes Thomas, 334
Hood, Thomas, 531
Hooker, Richard, 275
Hume, David, 422
Hunt, Leigh, 505

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