Her sighs and tears and musings holy;

That sounds with idiot laughter solely;

But has its chord in melancholy.

Hood was true to this vow of acceptance. He vowed to accept willingly the pains as well as joys of life for what they could teach. Therefore, years expanded and enlarged his sympathies, and gave to his lightest jokes an obvious harmony with a great moral design, not obtrusively obvious, but enough so to give a sweetness and permanent complacency to our laughter. Indeed, what is written in his gayer mood has affected us more, as spontaneous productions always do, than what he has written of late with grave design, and which has been so much lauded by men too obtuse to discern a latent meaning, or to believe in a good purpose unless they are formally told that it exists.

The later serious poems of Hood are well known; so are his jest books and novel. We have now in view to speak rather of a little volume of poems published by him, some years since, republished here, but never widely circulated.

When a book or a person comes to us in the best possible circumstances, we judge—not too favorably, for all that the book or person can suggest is a part of its fate, and what is not seen under the most favorable circumstances is never quite truly seen either as to promise or performance—but we form a judgment above what can be the average sense of the world in general as to its merits, which may be esteemed, after time enough has elapsed, a tolerably fair estimate of performance, though not of promise or suggestion.

We became acquainted with these poems in one of those country towns which would be called, abroad, the most provincial of the province. The inhabitants had lost the simplicity of farmers' habits, without gaining in its place the refinement, the variety, the enlargement of civic life. Their industry had received little impulse from thought; their amusement was gossip. All men find amusement from gossip—literary, artistic, or social; but the degrees in it are almost infinite. They were at the bottom of the scale; they scrutinized their neighbors' characters and affairs incessantly, impertinently, and with minds unpurified by higher knowledge; consequently the bitter fruits of envy and calumny abounded.

In this atmosphere I was detained two months, and among people very uncongenial both to my tastes and notions of right. But I had a retreat of great beauty. The town lay on the bank of a noble river; behind it 

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