It was not strange I saw no good in man, In ill-success; to sympathize, be proud Who once loved rashly; and shape forth a third, To drink the light-springs, beamless thence itself- Meanwhile, I have done well, though not all well. It is but for a time; I press God's lamp 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 : 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 So silently we seemed to speak, So slowly moved about, As we had lent her half our powers Our very hopes belied our fears, We thought her dying when she slept, For when the morn came dim and sad, Denham, Sir John, 288 Donne, Dr. John, 254, 27 Dorset, Earl of, vide Sackville, T. Douglas, Gawin, 195 Drama, end of the old, 280 Dramatists of Eighteenth Century, 369, 396 Dryden, John, 328 Dunbar, William, 196 Dyer, John, 371 Hall, Joseph, 249 |