“Hood dines to-day,” she writes, “with Doctor Bowring, in Queen Square.  He knew him well years ago in ‘The London Magazine’; and he wrote, a few days ago, to ask Hood to meet Bright and Cobden on business,—­I think, to write songs for the League.  I augur good from it.  This comes of ’The Song of the Shirt,’ of which we hear something continually.”

As an instance of her judgment, we may mention that she prophesied at once all the success which followed this same “Song of the Shirt.”  When read to her in manuscript,—­“Now mind, Hood,” said she, “mark my words, this will tell wonderfully!  It is one of the best things you ever did.”  Her reference to “The Song” in her letter has a sort of pathetic naivete in it; it shows that the thought with which she was concerned was practical, not poetical,—­not her husband’s fame, but her household cares.  She was thinking of songs that would turn into substance,—­of “notes” that could be exchanged for cash,—­of evanescent flame that might be condensed into solid coal, which would, in turn, make the pot boil,—­and of music that could be converted into mutton.  O ye entranced bards, drunk with the god, seeing visions and dreaming dreams in the third heaven, that is, the third story!  O ye voluminous historians, who live in the guilt and glory of the past, and are proud in making the biggest and thickest books for the dust, cobwebs, and moths of the future!  O ye commentators, who delight to render obscurity more obscure, and who assume that in a multitude of words, as in a multitude of counsellors, there is wisdom!  O ye critics, who vote yourselves the Areopagites of Intellect, whose decrees confer immortality in the Universe of Letters!  O all ye that write or scribble,—­all ye tribes, both great and small, of pen-drivers and paper-scrapers!—­know ye, that, while ye are listening in your imaginative ambition to the praise of the elect or the applause of nations, your wives are often counting the coppers that are to buy the coming meal, alarmed at the approaching rent-day, or trembling in apprehension of the baker’s bill.

Hood, in 1840, returned to reside in England during the small remainder of his life.  For a few months he edited the “New Monthly,” and then, for a few months more, a magazine of his own.  But the whole of this period was filled with bodily and mental trials, of which it is painful to read.  Yet within this period it was that he wrote some of his finest things, both laughable and serious.  It is, however, to be remarked, it was now he reached down to that well of tears which lay in the depth of his nature.  Always before, there had been misty exhalations from it, that oozed up into the sunshine of his fancy, and that took all the shapes of glisten or of gloom which his Protean genius gave them.  In the rapid eccentricities of cloud and coruscation, the source which supplied to the varying forms so much of their substance was hidden or unminded.  But now the fountain of thought and tragedy had been readied, whence the waters of sin and suffering spring forth clear and unalloyed in their own deep loneliness, and we hear the gush and the murmur of their stream in such monodies as “The Song of the Shirt,” “The Lay of the Laborer,” and “The Bridge of Sighs.”