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The dreary stairs, where with the sounding stress
Of every step so many echoes blended,

The mind, with dark misgivings, feared to guess
How many feet ascended.'

Everywhere the place is haunted, and everything appears to feel the consciousness of crime. In a thousand ways the world of dumb things speaks, palpably enough, its knowledge of the mystery. The ancestral portraits on the walls are filled with no mere simulated life :

Their souls were looking thro' their painted eyes

With awful speculation.'

At the sound of the door creaking on its rusty hinges it seems as
though the murder would out at last! The screech-owl appears
to 'mock the cry that she had heard some dying victim utter!'
'A shriek that echoed from the joisted roof,

And up the stair and further still and further,
Till in some ringing chamber far aloof

It ceased its tale of murther!

The wood-louse dropped and rolled into a ball,
Touched by some impulse occult or mechanic;
And nameless beetles ran along the wall

In universal panic.

The subtle spider that from overhead

Hung like a spy on human guilt and error,
Suddenly turned, and up its slender thread
Ran with a nimble terror.'

There was no human voice in the place to speak the tale of horror and amazement. Only every bit of red shone ominously vivid, as though it were self-lighted, and the 'Bloody Hand' pointed with prophetic hints to a chamber, across the door of which no spider hung its web, and not even a midge dare dance in the sunbeam when it fell there :

'The Bloody Hand, significant of crime,

That, glaring on the old heraldic banner,
Had kept its criron unimpaired by time
In such a wondrous manner!

And over all there hung a cloud of fear;
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
"The place is haunted!

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Hood's novel of Tylney Hall' is worth reading, and will be

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read when our present popular sensation stuff is long forgotten. It contains one capital character, that of Unlucky Joe,' which might have been an early sketch from the hand of Mr. Dickens. Poor Joe, with his inevitable Fridays' and wallowings in the Slough of Despond, is a specimen of Hood's peculiar mixture. He is so sure that fate is dead against him, and so sick of his unlucky life, that if it pleased God Almighty to chuck down from heaven a handful of sudden deaths, you'd see me scrambling after one as hard as ever a barefoot beggar boy for a copper out of a coach window.' There are good hints in Mrs. Hanway, who reckoned it second only to the mortal sin that so horrified John Bunyan, to have let a sick gentleman go to heaven without having taken his physic; in Twiggs, the vulgar, who thought it strange that a man of his property could not have a fine day for his fête; and in the Baronet, a genuine bit of old English foxhunting nature, florid as a picture by Rubens; sound in heart and brain as in wind; a man that lived up to the traditionary mark, which was not low-water mark, and only died once.

Hood, we are informed, amongst other literary projects, thought of writing a set of Books for Children. It is to be regretted that he did not live to create such a child's world of fancy, fun and faerie as it must have been. He had a remarkable knack of getting into all sorts of small places, whether it was the insect world or fairy world, or the world of infantine humanity. Into the latter he would slyly creep, as it were on all-fours, in such unexpected ways as would pleasantly startle his small friends with shouts of laughter. He could always get to the heart of a child, however much he might bewilder its mind with the movement and glitter of his fun, which dazzled too much for the meaning to be quickly apprehended, filling the young imagination with a thousand sparkles of splendour, all alive as the dress of Harlequin.

It must have been a droll entertainment to have watched the child-face, and seen it lifted every now and then, with the eyebrows arched in wonder at what was coming next, and heard the 'Oh, Mr. Hood!' As a sample of his frolic with the little ones, and his way of playing with them and puzzling them, we turn over his letters to the children of his good friend, Dr. Elliot:'MY DEAR MAY,

I promised you a letter, and here it is. I was sure to remember it, for you are as hard to forget as you are soft to roll down a hill with. What fun it was! only so prickly I thought I had a porcupine in one pocket, and a hedgehog in the other. The next time, before we kiss the earth, we will have its face shaved. I get no rolling

at

at St. John's Wood. Tom and Fanny only like roll and butter; and as for Mrs. Hood, she is for rolling in money. Tell Dunnie that Tom has set his trap in the balcony, and caught a cold, and tell Jeannie that Fanny has set her foot in the garden, but it has not come up yet. I hope we shall all have a merry Christmas. I mean to come in my most ticklesome waistcoat, and to laugh till I grow fat, or at least streaky. Fanny is to be allowed a glass of wine, Tom's mouth is to have a hole holiday, and Mrs. Hood is to sit up to supper. There will be such doings, and such things to eat! but pray, pray, pray, mind they don't boil the baby by mistake for a plump pudding.'

The next quotations are from Letters written to the Children at the seaside:

'MY DEAR JEANNIE,

'So you are at Sandgate! If you should catch a big crab, with strong claws, and like experiments--you can shut him up in a cupboard with a loaf of sugar, and see whether he will break it with his nippers. Besides crabs, I used to find jelly-fish on the beach, made, it seemed to me, of sea-calves' feet, and no sherry. There were starfish also, but they did not shine till they were stinking. I hope you like the sea! I always did when I was a child, which was about two years ago. Sometimes it makes such a fizzing and foaming, I wonder some of our London cheats do not bottle it up and sell it for gingerpop. When the sea is too rough, if you pour the sweet oil out of the cruet all over it, and wait for a calm, it will be quite smooth-much smoother than a dressed salad. Some time ago exactly, there used to be large white birds, with black-tipped wings, that went flying and screaming over the sea. Do you ever see such birds? We used to call them " gulls," but they didn't mind it.

'Well, how happy you must be ! Childhood is such a joyous, merry time, and I often wish I was two or three children! And wouldn't I pull off my three pairs of shoes and socks, and go paddling in the sea up to my six knees!

'When I can buy a telescope powerful enough, I shall have a peep at you.'

So the rare pen goes romping on from one child's mind to the other; the tickling inquiries and funny information flowing from it with the most natural gradation, until, in the letter to the youngest, we have the crowning touches of nature, and a fine flash of imagination :—

'MY DEAR May,

'How do you like the sea? Not much, perhaps; it's " so big." But shouldn't you like a nice little ocean, that you could put into a pan?

'Have the waves ever run after you yet, and turned your little two shoes into pumps full of water? Have you been bathed yet in the sea,

and

and were you afraid? I was, the first time; and, dear me! how I kicked and screamed!—or at least meant to scream, but the sea, ships and all, began to run into my mouth, and so I shut it up. Did you ever try, like a little crab, to run two ways at once? See if you can do it, for it is good fun; never mind tumbling over yourself a little at first. It would be a good plan to hire a little crab for an hour a day, to teach baby to crawl, if ho can't walk, and if I was his mamma, I would, too! Bless him! But I must not write on him any more-he is 80 soft, and I have nothing but steel pens. And now, good bye! The last fair breeze I blew dozens of kisses for you, but the wind changed, and, I am afraid, took them all to Miss H- -, or somebody that it

shouldn't.'

Of Hood's power to enter into the heart of a child, and measure the world through its eyes, his remark on the size of the sea is a felicitous illustration. It so admirably expresses that affection of the little one which seeks to embrace what it loves, and is not satisfied with the greater possessions and less power; while the description of the sea running, ships and all, into the youngster's mouth is overwhelming.

It is now some twenty years since Thomas Hood, with heart aching for the poor, sang his famous 'Song of the Shirt,' but its echoes have not yet died out of the minds of all good men and true women. Much floating, hazy sympathy for the lower classes-which may at all times be found amongst the real aristocrats has since then been condensed, and fallen like refreshing rain from heaven to enrich the life of the poor, making many of the waste places blossom. Without any canting about the progress of our age, we may congratulate ourselves on living in a time when the wealthy and the high-born have a livelier sense of their responsibilities-think more of their duties than their dues-more of serving, less of compelling service, than in any time past. Still the day has not yet come when poems like these are no more needed to work with their finer particles in the mind of our nation; to kindle kindly thoughts, and keep the conscience quick, the ear open to the cry of suffering, the eyes clear to see the wrongs that are done to labour, under the sanction of Law, in the common light of day. The feelings to which these make appeal will always be necessary to supplement and soften the hard hearts of those who do not understand what Political Economy is, and are fond of claiming its sanction for the neglect of duty. The more perfect the societary arrangement, according to the Manchester ideal, the greater surely is our need of tha❤ humanity which, working by personal influences, can alone bring about any better relationship betwixt rich

and

and poor. Many no doubt easily shook off the influence of Hood's startling midnight cry, which still rings in the ears of others, on behalf of the slaves of the needle. Their blinds were drawn down to shut out the sorry sight which the poet showed them in the street, and the silken pillow soon dulled the sound to their delicate ears. It is not at all comfortable to be told how much human life goes to the making of the robes you wear, or how many roses are taken from fair childish cheeks to give a moment's sweetness and a glow of colour to a costly faded life! So they turned away and forgot it as quickly as possible. A recent event has proved to us how necessary it is that the vision of the Lady's Dream' should be shown again and again, with its appalling sights that will be seen though the eyes are shut. The poet tells us how the lady lay in her soft warm bed, a very nest of luxury; but she moaned in her broken sleep, and tossed her restless arms. So great was her terror that she started up, and seemed to see some dreadful phantom in the dark, and the curtains shook with her tremblings:

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'And the light that fell on the bordered quilt

Kept a tremulous gleam;

And her voice was hollow, and shook as she cried—
"Oh me! that awful dream!"

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But for the vision the lady had never dreamed of this world's walking spectres and the moving shadows, so to speak, of Fashion's fleeting brightness-of the hearts that break daily, the tears that fall hourly, the naked she might have clothed, the hungry she

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