of the ludicrous.  We have evidence of this in the poem called “The Last Man.”  Sometimes we find the idea of the supernatural added to the ludicrous with great moral and imaginative effect.  Observe with what pathetic tenderness this is done in the “Ode to the Printer’s Devil,”—­with what solemn moral power in “The Tale of a Trumpet,”—­and with what historical satire and social insight in “The Knight and the Dragon.”  Sometimes the ludicrous element entirely disappears, and we have the purely terrible,—­the terrible in itself, as in “The Tower of Lahneck,”—­the terrible in pathos, as in “The Work-House Clock,”—­the terrible in penitence and remorse, as in “The Lady’s Dream,”—­the terrible in temptation and despair, as in “The Dream of Eugene Aram.”

Hood, as we have seen, is a perfect master equally of the grotesque and the terrible.  Some writers, it may be, were as powerful as he in the grotesque.  Rabelais had a certain hugeness in it, which Hood did not have and did not need.  Other writers transcended Hood in the region of the terrible.  It is almost useless to name such sublime masters of it as Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton.  But in the intermingling of the grotesque and terrible, and in the infinite diversification of them as thus united, not only has Hood no equal, but no rival.  In some few marked and outward directions of his genius he may have imitators; but in this magical alchemy of sentiment, thought, passion, fancy, and imagination, the secret of his laboratory was his alone; no other man has discovered it, and no other man, as he did, could use it.  But he worked in the purely ideal also;—­if he did not work supremely, he worked well, as we have proof in many of his serious poems, and particularly in his “Plea for the Midsummer Fairies.”  And when aroused,—­but that was rarely,—­he could wield a burningly satiric pen, and with manly indignation and impassioned scorn wield it to chastise the hypocritical and the arrogant, as his letter to a certain pious lady and his “Ode to Rae Wilson” bear sufficient witness.

Along with the grotesque and terrible in Hood’s writings we also often observe a wizard-like command over the elements of the desolate, the weird, the sad, the forlorn, and the dreary.  We may trace it in many of the poems to which we have already alluded.  But it appears with all its lonely gloom of power in “The Haunted House.”  This poem is surely the work of a fancy that must have often gone into the desert of the soul to meditate, and that must have made itself acquainted with all that is dismal in imagery and feeling.  Pictures, in succession or combination, it would be impossible to conceive, which more dolefully impress the mind with a sense of doom, dread, and mystery; yet every picture is in itself natural, and, while each adds to the intensity of the impression, each is in itself complete.