Gold! gold! gold! gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold,
Molten, graven, hammered and rolled,
Heavy to get, and light to hold,
Hoarded, bartered, bought, and sold,
Stolen, borrowed, squandered, doled:
Spurned by the young, but hugged by the old,
E’en to the verge of the church-yard’s mould;
Price of many a crime untold:
Gold! gold! gold! gold!
Good or bad a thousand-fold—
How widely its agencies vary,
To save, to ruin, to curse, to bless;—
As even its minted coins express,
Now stamped with the image of Good Queen Bess,
And now of a Bloody Mary.
The bulk of his production is expressed with the same levity which
strikes the ear, as in the verses just quoted. He was unquestionably
the greatest trafficker in words of double meaning the world had ever
known. His stock was exhaustless, and whether home-made or far-fetched,
his _mots_ and _jeux_ were sure of currency.
The secret of the perpetual playfulness of his pen is to be found in
the eagerness of the public mind to be moved to mirth, and in his
need to minister to the mood of the public mind. In a word, he was
dependent upon his brain for his bread. Labor was his law, and so, as
it befel, humor and mirth became his profits. His puns (so easily spun
from himself,) were transmuted into pence and pounds. His quips looked
quaintly ahead to quarter-day. His grotesque metaphors were sold in the
street, like plaster images, for a livelihood. Had he been less under
constraint to please the public ear, he would have wrought, perchance,
one dull epic, instead of a thousand delicious epigrams.
* * * * *
His writings are indeed light, but in a double sense. They are light
with the buoyancy of the zephyr or of the gossamer wafted in its bosom.
They are light also with the luminousness of the sun-beam, kindling
beauty and light and warmth as it flashes along its track. The writings
of Hood are to be laughed at, but they who only laugh at them have
no true appreciation of their subtle power. They disparage them for
their mirthfulness, because they can not discover the depths below the
dimpling surface of their rolling humor.
* * * * *
His description of a November fog, in London, must be familiar to many
of you, but I will venture to quote it in illustration of his facility
in rhyming, and also of his skill in supplying the details of a picture
which is all painted only in shadows. It is entitled,
“NOVEMBER.”
No sun—no moon—
No morn—no noon,—
No dawn—no dark—no proper time of day,—
No sky—no earthly view,—
No distance looking blue,—
No road—no street—no “’t other side the way,”—
No end to any row,—
No indications where the crescents go,—
No top to any steeple,—
No recognitions of familiar people,—
No courtesies for showing ’em,—
No knowing ’em.
No traveling at all—no locomotion,—
No inkling of the way—no motion,—
“No go”—by land or ocean,—
No mail—no post,—
No news from any foreign coast,—
No park—no ring—no afternoon gentility,—
No company—no nobility,—
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,—
No comfortable feel in any member,—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,—
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,—
November.
Transitions from gay to grave are so much in the manner of Hood that
you will not wonder if I sandwich between the playful production of
his muse just quoted, and another still more grotesque to follow, an
example of his verse, in which the bizarre yields entirely to the
beautiful, the tricksy to the true, leaving “a gem of purest ray
serene” for the coronal of pastoral poetry. It is the charming idyl,
“RUTH.”
She stood breast-high amid the corn,
Clasped by the golden light of morn,
Like the sweetheart of the sun,
Who many a glowing kiss had won.
On her cheek an autumn flush,
Deeply ripened,—such a blush
In the midst of brown was born,
Like red poppies grown with corn.
Round her eyes her tresses fell,
Which were blackest none could tell,
But long lashes veiled a light
That had else been all too bright.
And her hat, with shady brim,
Made her tressy forehead dim;—
Thus she stood amid the stooks,
Praising God with sweetest looks:—
“Sure,” I said, “heaven did not mean
Where I reap thou shouldst but glean,
Lay thy sheaf down, and come,
Share my harvest and my home.”
I hoped to find time for quoting one of his numerous ballads, in
which he not only displays his facility in punning, and satirizes the
lachrymose style of ballad verse prevalent at that period, but I must
content myself with reciting the oft-repeated stanza with which one
of his best ballads closes, burdened with the fate of Ben, the jilted
sailor-boy:—
His death, which happened in his berth,
At forty-odd befell:
They went and told the sexton,
And the sexton tolled the bell.
If I were required to indicate that one of all Hood’s poems in which
the humor is the maddest and merriest, I think I should, in spite of
embarrassment, choose “the tale of a trumpet,” which, like the story
of Miss Kilmansegg, rides double, and carries a moral behind it. Dame
Eleanor Spearing, who was too excessively deaf to hear the scandals
narrated in her presence, was beset by a peddler, who, with many arts
and pleas, prevailed upon her to buy of him a marvelous ear-trumpet.
From that time the dame heard sad and shocking tales at the village
fire-sides, and, of course, repeated them, until the place was filled
with “confusion worse confounded,” and in Hood’s own words:—
In short, to describe what came to pass
In a true, though somewhat theatrical way,
Instead of “Love in a Village”—alas!
The piece they performed was “The Devil to Pay.”
The discovery is soon made that the dame’s diabolical trumpet has blown
all this mischief, and a condign fate overtakes the unhappy old woman.
She is seized by the populace and dragged to the pond just as the
peddler who sold her the horn makes his appearance, but—
“Before she can utter the name of the d—
Her head is under the water level!”
The moral of the story points itself, but you can afford to listen to
the humorist’s quaint phrasing of it:
“There are folks about town—to name no names—
Who greatly resemble this deafest of dames;
And over their tea, and muffins and crumpets,
Circulate many a scandalous word,
And whisper tales they could only have heard
Through some such diabolical trumpet.”
I did not interrupt the outlines of the story to illustrate its
wonderful plethora of puns and pranks, but you will not be averse to a
moment’s delay here for a taste of its quaint quality. It is altogether
a piece of poetical pyrotechny, in which there are verbal rockets, and
serpents, and stars and blue-lights, and double-headers; but, as in
many of his poems, the humor seems to go off chiefly with the giddy
sparkling whirl and whiz of metrical Catherine wheels. The peddler
commends his marvelous trumpet to the dame so marvelously deaf:—
“It’s not the thing for me—I know it—
To crack my own trumpet up, and blow it;
But it is the best, and time will show it.
There was Mrs. F.,
So very deaf,
That she might have worn a percussion cap,
And been knocked on the head without hearing it snap.
Well, I sold her a horn, and the very next day
She heard—from her husband at Botany Bay!
Come—eighteen shillings—that’s very low,
You’ll save the money as shillings go,—
And I never knew so bad a lot,—
By hearing whether they ring or not!
Eighteen shillings! it’s worth the price,
Supposing you’re delicate-minded and nice,
To have the medical man of your choice,
Instead of the one with the strongest voice—
Who comes and asks you how’s your liver,
And where you ache, and whether you shiver,
And as to your nerves, so apt to quiver,
As if he was hailing a boat on a river!
And then, with a shout, like Pat in a riot,
Tells you to ‘Keep yourself perfectly quiet!’”
* * * * *
In Hood’s remarkable poems of passion and imagination are to be found,
perhaps, his patent of nobility in the realm of poetry. But, if it was
made out there, it has had renewal in his later poems of humanity. It
was in the last period of his great and restless toil that he flung
off, like light fancies, some of his poems, whose stanzas will be
echoed in the anthem of his undying fame. Of these are “The Lay of the
Laborer,” “The Pauper’s Christmas Carol,” “The Song of the Shirt,”
and “The Bridge of Sighs.” It was coincidently with the epoch of that
comical and potential journal, _Punch_, (which has never failed to
poke the heavy ribs of oppression, and to prick the great fat paunch
of selfishness, in a very lively manner), that this new inspiration
of brotherly kindness came to Hood. His troubled heart began to beat
itself against the bars of its intellectual prison-house, and to
wail out its resistless pleas for the poor, the friendless, and the
desolate. “The Song of the Shirt” is one of the most extraordinary
lyrics ever struck from the harp of poesy. Little thought he, however,
that the lines—which, as they were written by his trembling fingers,
were almost as spasmodic as if they had been literally convulsed out
of his suffering frame,—little thought he that they would peal out on
London’s ear, on England’s ear, and strike deep down into the national
heart with a warrant for his immortality, more imperative and universal
than any which his wit had framed, or his genius had wrought, from the
beginning of his career down to the day on which he sang “The Song of
the Shirt.”
“Now, mind, Hood, mark my words, this will tell wonderfully: it is the
best thing you ever did,” said his wife, as she folded the manuscript
for the pocket of _Punch_. And “tell” it did, for not only did England
make it a household ballad, but France and Germany and Italy, even,
engrafted it upon their popular anthology, while here, in the New
World, we bear its odd burden,—
Seam, and gusset, and band,
Band, and gusset, and seam,
Stitch, stitch, stitch, and
Work, work, work,
not more in our memories than in our hearts. Let us not forget,
moreover, that women,
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
sent their _shillings_ from their scanty earnings all over England to
help sculpture the pale marble that covers poor Hood on Kensall Green.
Quite as remarkable as the song I have just dismissed is “The Bridge
of Sighs.” It withstood the ponderous assaults of dull-headed and
cold-hearted critics when it was builded, and now its somber arches
will span the deep river of the popular feeling forever and ever. It
is a marvelously tender ode, a rare carol of charity, warbled out
fearlessly, where prudish philanthropy would have drawn down its hood
and held its breath, lest, perchance, it should seem at the side of a
fallen woman. Now may the world lift up its head and exult that sorrow,
shame, and despair have found a champion, whose voice over the
One more unfortunate,
Weary of breath,
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death,
echoes the divine verdict of Jesus of Nazareth over the sinful woman
brought to him for the stern judgment of Moses, “_Let him that is
without sin among you cast the first stone._”
* * * * *
Much remains unsaid that I would fain say. But it is time for me to
close. And what words shall I choose for last words concerning my
subject, who, if he were indeed my _subject_, would make me doubly
royal, for was not he the crowned king of kindly wits?
He did not live to laugh, albeit he often laughed to live. There is,
indeed, a marvel to us in his exterior mirthfulness, for he had a deep
fount of sadness in his soul. The last lines of his magnificent “Ode to
Melancholy” afford us the key to his inner nature:
There is no music in the life
That sounds with idle laughter solely;
There’s not a string attuned to mirth,
But has its chord in melancholy.
Yet had he wept where he has laughed, had he poured forth bile instead
of humor, had he exhaled dull vapors instead of fancies, he might have
made a few miserable, but the many he has made glad would have missed
the blessed sunshine of his song and spirit.
So, for his “Lays,” that yet lift us up; for his “Whims,” that we are
but too happy to indulge; for his oddities that we even admire; for his
“Own,” which is yet far more ours than his; for his “Designs,” which
were never against any one’s piece but his own; for his “Pleas,” which
pleased all classes of his clients; for his “Puns,” with which folly
alone was punished; for his spirit, which was always of highest “proof”
on trial; for his wit, which, witnessed of another’s, as Shakspere
says, “it ambles, it goes easily;” for his worth, that had a morning
and a noon tide, though it was never (k)nighted; for his heart, which
in the chase of charity, was never be-_hind_; for his name, which is
a covering of honor and a crown of bays;—for all these things, be
blessings on the name and memory of Thomas Hood. [Great applause.]
* * * * *
Dr. Vincent said: I am surprised and delighted to learn that about
seventy members of the C. L. S. C. went out after fossils with Colonel
Daniels before breakfast this morning. I am very glad to learn that so
many of our circle are interested in this department of study.
The members of the C. L. S. C. are most of them women, or a very large
part of them women, and they hear on this ground a good many things
said affecting woman’s sphere and work, and they hear in the course of
the conversation a great many things said which may not be altogether
true, in reference to the sentiments prevailing at Chautauqua
concerning this question of woman’s work and woman’s sphere. I was very
glad to know that opportunity was taken the other day to discuss one
side of that question, and I am very glad that opportunity was given
to discuss the other side this afternoon. We must remember in all
this discussion, that the largest liberty is granted to all members
of the C. L. S. C., that those who believe in woman’s suffrage, and
those who are opposed to woman’s suffrage, may be equally loyal to the
great objects of the Circle. One thing, however, must be said, that
if woman is depreciated as to her relative social power, influence,
or value by the managers of the Circle, they are not worthy of your
confidence. For the Circle which proposes to exalt the home, and
increase the intellectual power of woman as mother, and as a member of
society, should certainly recognize as a fundamental doctrine woman’s
equality in every legitimate respect with man. [Great applause.] And,
if opportunity affords for the further discussion of this question, I
hope we shall be able to avail ourselves of the opportunity, and have
a thorough understanding among all members of the C. L. S. C. as to
where those of us who are most devoted to its interests stand on these
questions. I make these remarks, in as indefinite a way as I can, that
through the mists you may catch the spirit of the hour, and not mistake
the true sentiment of the Chautauqua Circle. [Applause.]
Adjourned.
* * * * *
DR. GODWIN’S “MAN IN THE MOON.”—This amusing little work was published
in 1638, and written by Dr. Godwin, Bishop of Llandaff in the reign of
Queen Elizabeth, and collated to the see of Hereford by her successor,
King James I. It was composed when the author was a young student
at Christ Church College, Oxford, under the assumed name of Domingo
Gonzales. One of the prints represents a man drawn up from the summit
of a mountain, with an engine set in motion by birds, which was the
mode in which the said Gonzales was supposed to have reached the moon.
This curious and now scarce production [there is a copy of it in the
British Museum] excited wonder and censure on its appearance, and is
thought to have supplied hints to Dr. Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, in
compiling his work called “A Discovery of a New World in the Moon.” Dr.
Godwin is familiar to most clerical readers as author of “_Præsules
Anglicani_,” a useful referential work, and his “_Nuntius Inanimatus_”
is said to have contained the first hints of a telegraph, which useful
invention was, however, not discovered till the end of the last
century.