“Dear Moir,[A]

“God bless you and yours, and goodbye!  I drop these few lines, as in a bottle from a ship water-logged and on the brink of foundering, being in the last stage of dropsical debility; but, though suffering in body, serene in mind.  So, without reversing my union-jack, I await my last lurch.  Till which, believe me, dear Moir,

“Yours most truly,

“Thomas hood.”

[Footnote A:  The Delta of Blackwood]

Stanzas.

  “Farewell, Life!  My senses swim,
  And the world is growing dim;
  Thronging shadows cloud the light,
  Like the advent of the night;
  Colder, colder, colder still,
  Upward steals a vapor chill;
  Strong the earthly odor grows,—­
  I smell the Mould above the Rose!”

  “Welcome, Life!  The spirit strives! 
  Strength returns, and hope revives! 
  Cloudy fears and shapes forlorn
  Fly like shadows at the morn;
  O’er the earth there comes a bloom,
  Sunny light for sullen gloom,
  Warm perfume for vapors cold,—­
  I smell the Rose above the Mould!”

Nothing at first appears more easy than to define and to describe the genius of Hood.  It is strictly singular, and entirely his own.  That which is his is completely his, and no man can cry halves with him, or quarters,—­hardly the smallest fraction.  The estimate of his genius, therefore, puts the critic to no trouble of elaborate discrimination or comparison.  When we think of Hood as a humorist, there is no need that we should at the same time think of Aristophanes, or Lucian, or Rabelais, or Swift, or Sterne, or Fielding, or Dickens, or Thackeray.  When we think of him as a poet,—­except in a few of his early compositions,—­we are not driven to examine what he shares with Chaucer, or Spenser, or Shakspeare, or Milton, or Byron, or Coleridge, or Wordsworth, or any of the poetic masters of literature.  Whether as humorist or as poet, he is in English literature what Richter is in German literature, “the only one.”  Then the characteristics of his genius are outwardly so evident, that, in merely a glance, we fancy we comprehend them.  But the more we think, the more we reflect, the more the difficulty opens on us of doing full justice to the mind of Hood.  We soon discover that we are dealing, not with a mere punster or jester, not with a mere master of grimace or manufacturer of broad grins, not with an eccentric oddity in prose or verse, not with a merry-andrew who tickles to senseless laughter, not with a spasmodic melodramatist who writhes in fictitious pain, but that we are dealing with a sincere, truthful, and most gifted nature,—­many-sided, many-colored, harmonious as a whole, and having a real unity as the centre of its power.  To enter into a complete exposition of such a nature is not our purpose:  we must content ourselves with noting some of its most striking literary and moral peculiarities.