There is room here for the finest expression of love and grief, for the wildest remonstrance against fate. Why are they made so lovely and so beloved? Why was a flower brought to such perfection, and then culled for no use? One of the older English writers has written an exquisite poem on this subject, painting a youthful pair, fitted to be not only a heaven but a world to one another. Hood had not power to paint or conceive such fulness of character; but, in a lesser style, he has written a fine poem. The best part of it, however, is the innocent cruelty and grief of the Sea Siren.

"Lycus the Centaur" is also a poem once read never to be forgotten. The hasty trot of the versification, unfit for any other theme, on this betokens well the frightened horse. Its mazy and bewildered imagery, with its countless glancings and glimpses, expressed powerfully the working of the Circean spell, while the note of human sadness, a yearning and condemned human love, thrills through the whole and gives it unity.

The Sonnets, "It is not death," &c., and that on Silence, are equally admirable. Whoever reads these poems will regard Hood as something more than a great wit,—as a great poet also.

To express this is our present aim, and therefore we shall leave to others, or another time, the retrospect of his comic writings. But having, on the late promptings of love for the departed, looked over these, we have been especially amused with the "Schoolmistress Abroad," which was new to us. Miss Crane, a "she Mentor, stiff as starch, formal as a Dutch ledge, sensitive as a daguerreotype, and so tall, thin, and upright, that supposing the Tree of Knowledge to have been a poplar, she was the very Dryad to have fitted it," was left, with a sister little better endowed with the pliancy and power of adaptation which the exigencies of this varied world-scene demand, in attendance upon a sick father, in a foreign inn, where she cannot make herself understood, because her French is not "French French, but English French," and no two things in nature or art can be more unlike. Now look at the position of the sisters.

"The younger, Miss Ruth, was somewhat less disconcerted. She had by her position the greater share in the active duties of Lebanon House, and under ordinary circumstances would not have been utterly at a loss what to do for the comfort or relief of her parent. But in every direction in which her instinct and habits would have prompted her to look, the materials she sought were deficient. There was no easy chair—no fire to wheel it to—no cushion to shake up—no cupboard 

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