Now, having gone over some of the most noticeable qualities in the writings of Hood, we come to the crowning quality of his genius, the simply pathetic.  We could, if space remained, adduce many psychological and other reasons why we apply this phrase to the pathos of Hood.  One reason is, that Hood’s pathos involves none of the complications of higher passion, nor any of the pomp which belongs, in mood, situation, or utterance, to the loftier phases of human suffering.  The sorrow of those who most attracted his sympathy was not theatrical or imposing.  It has been well said of him, that his “bias was towards all that was poor and unregarded.”  And thus, while those who painfully moved the charity and compassion of his genius were considered by him the victims of artificial civilization, his own feeling for them was natural and instinctive; yet never did natural and instinctive feeling receive expression more artistic, but with that admirable art in which elaboration attains the utmost perfection of simplicity.  It excites our wonder to observe how in pathos Hood’s genius divests itself of attributes which had seemed essential to its existence.  All that is grotesque, whimsical, or odd disappears, and we have only the soul of pity in the sound of song,—­in song “most musical, most melancholy.”  In pathos, Hood’s is not what we should call a transformed genius so much as a genius becoming divested of its coarser life, and then breathing purely the inner spirit of goodness and beauty.  The result is what one might almost term the “absolute” in pathos.  Nothing is excluded that is necessary to impression; nothing is admitted that could vulgarize or weaken it.  We have thus pathos at once practical and poetic,—­pathos at once the most affecting and the most ideal,—­coming from a heart rich with all human charities, and gaining worthy and immortal form by means of a subtile, deep, cultivated imagination.  The pathetic, therefore, no less than the comic, in Hood’s writings has all the author’s peculiar originality, but has it in a higher order.  Pathos was the product of the author’s mind when it was most matured by experience, and when suffering, without impairing its strength, had refined its characteristic benevolence to the utmost tenderness.

Hood’s pathos culminates in “The Song of the Shirt,” “The Lay of the Laborer,” and “The Bridge of Sighs.”

These are marvellous lyrics.  In spirit and in form they are singular and remarkable.  We cannot think of any poems which more show the mystic enchantment of genius.  How else was a ragged sempstress in a squalid garret made immortal, nay, made universal, made to stand for an entire sisterhood of wretchedness?  Here is the direst poverty, blear-eyed sorrow, dim and dismal suffering,—­nothing of the romantic.  A stern picture it is, which even the softer touches render sterner; still there is nought in it that revolts or shocks; it is deeply poetic, calls into passionate action the feelings of reverence and pity, and has