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THE MISER’S DEATH, BY W. C. CUTTLER.

An oid man sat by a fireless hearth, Tho’ the night was dark and «hill,

And mournfully over the frozen earth, The wind sobbed lone and shrill.

Ilis locks were white, and his eyes were grey And dim, but not with tears,

And his skeleton form was wasted away With penury more than years.

A rush-light was casting its fitful glare,

O’er its damp and dingy walls, Where the lizard had made his slimy Jair, And the venomous spider craw]s.

Put the meanest thing in this loathsome room Was the miser all worn and bare;

Where he sat like a ghost in an empty tomb, On his broken and only chair.

He had bolted the window and bard the door, And every nook he had scan’d,

And felt that fastening o’er and o’er With his cold and skinny hand;

And yet he sat gazing intently around, And trembled with silent fear,

And started and shuddered at every sound,

That fell on his coward ear.

EXAMINER.

THE

it varm sympathies, both with man as an in-|

All|

Ischool have 4 ne | dividual, and with the ongoings of society at large. jhave a er bul Ins linjustice, the inconsistency, falsehood, that are in the world. | All are a thet ‘fierce invective, furious recalcitration, and how! nd | pair, can never heal nor mitigate these calamities. All ‘are believers in their future and permanent mitigation ; land are convinced that literature— prosecuted in : pro- ‘per spirit, and combined with political anc “wr pro- 'gress—will marvellously tend to this result. All have ‘had, or have too much real or solid sorrow to make of it ia matter of parade, or to find or seek in ita frequent source of inspiration. All fully, would rather laugh ‘than weep men out of their follies, and ministries ou: of ‘their mistakes. And in an age which has seen the steam | ‘ofa tea kettle applied to change the physical aspect of ‘the earth—all have unbounded faith in the mightier ‘miracles of moral and political revolutions which the ‘mirth ofan English fireside, is yet to effect when pro- ‘perly condensed and pointed. We rather honour the /motives than share in the anticipations of this witty and ‘brilliant band, with which Dickens must unquestionably ‘rank. Much good they have done and are doing: but ithe full case, we fear, is beyond them. It isin mech- anism after all, not in magic, that they trust. We, on the other hand, think that our help lies in the doubie divine charm which Genius and Religion, fully wedded ‘together, are yet to wield; when, ina high sense, the

'words of the poets shall be accomplished—

the oppression, and the,

| | ! i |

* Love and song, song and love, entertwined evermore, Weary earth to the sons of its youth shall restore.

“ Ha! ha!” laughed the miser—“ I’m safe at last Mirth like that of Punch and Hood can relieve many From this night so cold and drear, a fog upon individual minds, but is powerless to remove

From the drenching rain and the driving blast, ithe great clouds which hang over the general history of

With my gold and my treasure here. humanity, and around even political abuses it often plays

{ am cold and wet with the icy rain, harmless as the summer evening’s lightning, or, at most,

And my health is bad, ’tis true, only loosens without smiting them down. Voltaire’s

Yet if I should light that fre again, ‘stile showed the Bastile in a ludicrous light, it fantas-

' ’T would cost me a penny or two. tically fell upon it; but Rousseau’s earnestness struck

‘ : ‘its pinnacle, and Mirabeau’s eloquence overturned it “ But Pil take a sip of this precious wine, ifrom its base. There is a call, in our case, for a holier

It will banish my cold and fears ; jearnestness, anda purer, nobler oratory. From the

It was given long since by a friend of mine, varity of styles which Hood has attempted in his poems,

I have kept it fur many years.” lwe select the two in which we think him most success-

So he drew a flask from a mouldy nook, \ful—the homely tragic narrative, and the grave pathetic a And drank of its rudy tide, ‘lyric. We find a specimen of the former in his Kugene i And his eyes grew bright with each draught he} Aram’s dream. This may be called a tale of the Con-

took, And his bosom swelied with pride.

“Let me see—let me see,” said the miser then, “ Tis some sixty years or more,

. Since the happy hour when I began

, To heap up my glittering store ;

j And well have [ sped in my anxious toil, As my crowded chests will show,

i

Or an emperor could bestow.

9

“From the orient realms J have rubies bright And gold from the famed Peru ;

Pye diamonds would shame the stars of night,

- And pearls like the merning dew.

And more ]’|l have, ere the morrow’s sun

. His rays from the west shall fling;

f That widow, to free her prisoned son,

| Shall bring me her bridal ring.”

aah

Hie turned to an old worm-eaten chest,

: And cautiously raised the lid,

; And then it shone like the clouds of the west With the sun in their splendour hid ;

And gem after gem of its precious store, He raised with exulting smile,

And counted, recounted them o’ér and o’er, In many a glittering pile. ae

ang? et

Why comes that flush to his pallid brow, While his eyes like his diamonds shine ? Why writhes he thus in such torture now = What was there imthe wine ? His lonely seat he s o regain— To craw) to his n ied ; But finding those efforts were all in vain, He clasp’d his gold and died: a

;

THOMAS HOOD. *

, BY GEORGE GILFILLAN, AUTHOR OF A “GALLERY OF

A ; L&EERARY PORTRAITS.” (Concluded from last week’s No.)

Thomas Hood did not stopatith himself. He and sensibly drqy around him T spirits, who withooe acter and influence of a school, ' indifferently, the Latter Coe . Who the parent of this schoo me whether Leigh Hunt or Hood quire. Perhaps, we m im ial a cluster of bees setti : thought of precedence flower. Leigh Hunt and Hood, indeed i qualities of Imagination than the othe . ess some properties in

|| I have more than would ransom a kingdom’s spoil, |

The genial kind-heartedness which distinguishes silently a little cluster of kindred tue name, have obtained the char- which may be called, ey, or the Punch School. properly speaking, was, , we will not stop to in- ay rather compare its members to 'g and singing together, without or feeling of inferiority, upon one , have far higher rs, but they poss

Common with them. All this to ask ‘Who's

fessional ; but how much new interest does it acquire ‘from the circumstauces, the scene, and the person to

but burning sense of the evil, the cant, the)

\whom the confession is made. Eugene Aram tells his story under the similitude of a dream, in the interval of the school toil, in a shady nook of the play-ground, and to alittle boy. What a ghastly contrast do all these peaceful images present to the tale he tells, in its mix- ture of homely horror and shadowy dread! What an ear this in which to inject the fell revelation! {[n what a plain, yet powerful setting, is the awful picture thus jinserted! And how perfect, at once the keeping and the contrast between youthful innocence and guilt, crey- haired between the eager, unsuspecting curiosity of the listener, and the slow and difficult throes, by which the narrator relieves himself of his burden of years !—be-' tween the sympathetic, half-pleasent, half-painful shud- der of the boy, and the strong convulsion of the man! The Giaour, emptying his polluted soul in the gloom of the convent aisle, and to the father trembling instead of his penitent, as the broken and fri ahtful tale gasps on, is not equal in interest nor awe to Eugene Aram re- ‘counting his dream to the chid; till you as well as he wish, and are tempted to shriek out, that he may awake and find it indeed a dream. Eugene Aram is not like Bulwer’s hero—a sublime demon in love; he is a merri- man in misery, and the poet seeks you to think—and you can think, of nothing about him, no more than him- iself can, except the one fatal stain, which has made ‘him what he is, and which he long has identified with |himself. Hood, with the intsinct and art ofa great pain- iter, seizes on that moment in Aram’s history which formed the hinge of its interest—not the moment of the murder, not the long, silent, devouring remorse that followed, not the hour of the defence, nor the execution —but that when the dark secret leapt into light and pu- nishment: this thrilling curdling instant, predicted from

future, is here seized,

[the tent, an pregnant with the

and startlingly shown. All that went before was

horrible, all that followed jis horrible and ethan, ntensely one. And how

poetic moment in the story is j ofthe last volume

inferior the laboured power and pathos of Bulwer’s novel to these lines ?

. That very night, while gentle sleep

‘ The a eyelids kissed, wo stern-faced mer set out from I, Through the cold and heavy mist oT

And Eugene Aram walked between With gyves upon his wrist,”

And here, how much of the horror is b us from the calm bed of the sleeping bey pat om

The two best oF his rave, patheti i

‘Song of the Shirt’ and the ‘ Bride ot Sige Tae =

was certainly Hood’s great hit, although we were sai 7

ashamed as rejoiced at its success. We blushed 48

we thought that at that Stage of his life he needed « x

jan introduction to the public, and that thousands and

tens of thousands were now for the first time itihiend Thomas Hood 2 The majority of ven

hacen eens See

_——-— ' ror sii a. ———— the readers of the age had never heard of his name til}

they saw it in Punch, and connected with a song---firgt. rate, certainly—but not better than many of his former poems! It cast, to us, a strange light upon the chance

'medleys of fame ; and, on the lines of Shakspeare,

“ There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”

Alas! in Hood’s instance, to fortune it did not lead, ang the fame was brief lightning before darkness.

And what is the song which made Hood awake one morniug and find himself famous ? Its great merit is jtg truth. Hood sits down beside the poor seainstress ag beside a sister, counts her tears, her stitches, her bones —too transparent by far through the sallow skin—seeg that though degraded she is a woman still; and risip up, swears, by Him that liveth for ever and ever that he will make her wrongs and wretchedness known to the limits of the country and of the race. And hark! how to that cracked, tuneless voice, trembling under its burden of sorrow, now shrunk down into the whispers of weakness, and now shuddering up into the laughter of despair, al] Britain listens for a noment—and for no, longer—lJistens, meets, talks, and does littie or nothing, {t was much that one shrill shriek should rise and re- verberate above that world of wild confused wailin which are the true ‘cries of London; but, alas! that it

‘has gone down again into the abyss, and that we are

now employed in criticising its artistic quality instead of recording its moral effect. Not altogether im vain, in-

deed, has it sounded, if it have comforted one lonely, heart, if it have bedewed with tears one arid eye, and, saved even one sufferer a pang of a kind which Shak-. speare only saw in part, when he spoke of the ‘ proud: man’s contumely’—the contumely of a proud, imperious,

fashionable, hard-hearted woman—“ one that was a wo-

man, but, rest her soul, she’s dead.”

Not the least striking nor impressive thing in this “Song of the Shirt” is its half jesting tone, and light, easy gallop. What sound in the street so lamentable as: the laughter ofa lost female! It is like a dimple on the. red waves ofhel]l. It is more melancholy than even, the death-cough shrieking up through her shattered frame, for it speaks o/'rest, death, the grave, forgetfulness, perhaps forgiveness. So Hood into the centre of this true tragedy has, with a skilful and sparing hand, dropt a pun or two, a Conceit or two; and these quibbles are precisely what make you quake. “Every tear hinders needle and thread,” reminds us distinctly of these words, occurring in the very centre of the Lear agony, “ Nuncle, itis a naughty nigat to swim in.” Hood, as well as Shakspeare, knew that to deepen the deepest woe of hu- manity it is the best way to show it in the lurid light of mirth; that there is a sorrow too deep for tears, too deep for sighs, but none too deep for smiles ; and that the aside and the laughter of an idiot might accompany and serye to aggravate the anguish of a god. And what tragedy in that swallow’s back which * twits with the spring, this captive without crime, this suicide without intention,

this martyr without the prospect of a fiery chariot!

The ‘ Bridge of Sighs’ breathes of the same spirit. The Poet is arrested by a crowd in the street; he pauses,

jand finds that itis a female suicide whom they have

plucked dead from the waters. His heart holds its own coroner's inquest upon her, and the poem is the verdict. Such verdicts are not common in the courts of clay. It sounds like a voice from a loftier climate, like the cry which closes the Faust, ‘She is pardoned” He knows not—what the jury will know in an hour—the cause of her crime. He wishes not to know it. He cannot de- termine what proportions of guilt, misery, and madness have mingled with her ‘mutiay.’ He knows only she was miserable, and she is dead—dead, and therefore a- way to ahigher tribunal. He knows only that whate’er her guilt, she never ceased to bea woman, to be a sister, and that death for him hushing ‘all questions, hiding all faults, has left on her only the beautiful” What can he do? He forgives her in the name of humanity ; every heart says amen, and his verdict, thus repeated and con- firmed may go down to eternity.

Here, too, as in the ‘ Song of the Shirt,’ the effect is trebled by the out-ward levity of the strain. Light and gay, the masquerade his grieved heart puts on, but its every flower, feather, and fringe shakes in the internal anguish as in a tempest. This one stanza (coldly prais- ed by a recent writer in the Edinburgh Review, whose heart and intellect seem to be dead, but to us how un- speakably dear!) might perpetuate the name of Hood:

“The bleak wind of March Made her tremble and shiver, But not the dark arch Nor the black flowing river; Mad from life’s history— Glad to death’s mystery, Swift to be hured, Anywhere, anyvhere Out of the world!”

After all this, we have not the heart, as Lord Jeffrey would say, to tarn to his *Whins and oddities,’ &c. at large. ae lies one who spa more blood and made more puns than any man living? was his self proposed epitaph. Whether punning pa natural to A or not, we cannot tell. We fear that with him, as with most people, it was a bad habit, cherished into a necessity and a disease. N othing could be more easily acquired than the power of punning, if, as Dr, Johnson was wont to say, one’s mind were but to atandon itself to it.