To Jeanie's brother, he writes: "I used him! But I must not write on him any to catch flat fish with a very long string-line. more he is so soft, and I have nothing but It was like swimming a kite! But perhaps steel pens. there are no flat fish at Sandgate except "And now, good-by; Fanny has made your shoe-soles. The best plan, if you want my tea, and I must drink it before it gets flat fish where there are none, is to bring too hot, as we all were last Sunday week. codlings, and hammer them into dabs. Once They say the glass was eighty-eight in the I caught a plaice, and seeing it all over red shade, which is a great age! The last fair spots, thought I had caught the measles." breeze I blew dozens of kisses for you, but He hopes the lad will be better soon, "for the wind changed, and, I am afraid, took somebody told me you had the shingles;" them all to Miss H- or somebody that and with regard to swimming, the poor sick it shouldn't." man observes: "I only swim in fancy, and strike out new ideas." To Mary Elliot, a still more youthful correspondent, he says: "I remember that, when I saw the sea, it used sometimes to be very fussy and fidgety, and did not always wash itself quite clean; but it was very fond of fun. Have the waves ever run after you yet, and turned your little two shoes into pumps, full of wa ter ? survived its birth. "In looking over some Little lips that never smiled; These two volumes are principally filled with letters, for Hood's life, like that of most literary men, was devoid of any striking incidents; like that of many of his brethren, too, it was beset with pecuniary cares, which hampered him for the last ten years of his life, and undoubtedly hastened his end. He married at twenty-five (in 1824), contrary to the wishes of his wife's family, but the young couple never found cause to "If you want a joke, you might push repent of their union: they loved one anDunnie into the sea, and then fish for him, other fondly to the last, and death, at the as they do for a Jack. But don't go in your-end, did but separate the husband and wife self, and don't let the baby go in and swim by a few months. Their first child scarcely away, although he is the shrimp of the family. Did you ever taste the sea water? The fishes are so fond of it they keep drinking it all the day long. Dip your little finger in, and then suck it to see how it tastes. A glass of it warm, with sugar, and a grate of nutmeg would quite astonish you. The water of the sea is so saline, I wonder nobody catches salt fish in it. I should think a good way would be to go out in a butter-boat, with a little melted for sauce. Have you been bathed yet in the sea, and were you afraid? I was the first time, and the time before that; 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. I think I see you being dipped into the sea, screwing your "Our servant knows a few words of Engeyes up, and putting your nose, like a but- lish too; her name is Gradle, the short for ton, into your mouth, like a button-hole, for Margaret. Jane wanted a fowl to boil for fear of getting another smell and taste! By me. Now, she has a theory that the more the by, did you ever dive your head under she makes her English un-English, the more water with your legs up in the air like a it must be like German. Jane begins by duck, and try whether you could cry Quack'? showing Gradle a word in the dictionary. Some animals can! I would try, but there "Gradle. Ja! yees-hühn-henne-ja! is no sea here, and so I am forced to dip yees. into books. If you would catch a crab for "Jane (a little through her nose). Hmn me, and teach it to dance the polka, it would -hum-hem-yes-yaw, ken you geet a make me quite happy; for I have not had fowl-fool-foal, to boil-bile-bole for dinany toys or playthings for a long time. Did you ever try, like a little crab, to run two ways at once? See if you can do it, for it I but embraced thee, soon as he!" In 1835, in consequence of the failure of a firm, Mr. Hood and family were obliged to take up their residence at Coblenz, where their ignorance of the language sometimes places them in the most ludicrous situations, heightened doubtless in the telling by the exaggerative author of Up the Rhine. ner ? "Gradle. Hot wasser? "Jane. Yaw in pit-pat-pot-hmn-hum is good fun; never mind tumbling over-eh! yourself a little at first. It would be a good "Gradle (a little off the scent again). plan to hire a little crab, for an hour a day, Ja, nein-wasser, pot-hot-nein. to teach baby to crawl, if he can't walk, and, "Jane. Yes-nc-good to eeat-chicken if I was his mamma, I would too! Bless-checken-checking-choking-bird-bard -beard-lays eggs-eeggs-hune, heine- with great vigilance, so that it was put into hin-make cheekin broth-soup-poultry- boil without any misfortunes. peltry-paltry! "Gradle (quite at fault). Pfeltrighchtch! -nein. "I went to bed early, telling Gradle to put it, when done, into the drawing-room till the morning. Hood was writing, and says it was put down smoking under his very nose, and the spirit of mischief was irresisti ble. I had bought a groschen's worth of new white wooden skewers that very morning. He cut them a little shorter than the pudding's diameter, and poked them in across and across in all directions, so neatly, "Jane (in despair). What shall I do? and Hood wont help me; he only laughs. This comes of leaving England! (She casts her eyes across the street at the governor's poultry-yard, and a bright thought strikes her.) Here, Gradle-come here-comb hair -hmn-hum-look there-dare-you see things walking--hmn, hum, wacking about that I never perceived any sign of them when -things with feathers-fathers-feethers. "Gradle (hitting it off again). Feethers -faders-ah hah! feddars-ja, ja, yees, sie bringen-feddars, ja, ja! "Jane echoes Feddars-yes-yaw, yaw! "Exit Gradle, and after three-quarters of an hour, returns triumphantly with two bundles of stationer's quills!!!" Poor Mrs. Hood tries her hand on cookery, and really with great success, although her husband pretends not to believe in it; his fun is, indeed, for family wear, and not merely of that artificial sort which only sets other people's dinner-tables in a roar. There must have been more laughter in that little humble lodging at Coblentz, and among that exiled household, than in half the splendid tourist-parties who "did" the Rhine in those summers with travelling-carriage and courier. 66 Yesterday morning," writes his wife, "I set to work very seriously to make some potted beef, and succeeded, little thinking what ungrateful jests I should draw upon my poor head from Hood. "Being proud of my own fabrication, I produced it at tea, when De Franck came, and then commenced the jokes of the goodfor-nothing. He asked with apparent interest how it was made, and I said: 'I pounded it with a pestle and mortar.' 'But, then, dear, we have got not one, you know.' I packed and sealed it up the next day for De Franck's man to carry over to Ehrenbreitstein. He came to thank me, and praised it highly. I find that while I was out of the room, Hood asked him if it was not well trussed, and he answered 'Yes' so gravely, that Hood thought he meditated some joke in retaliation, and was on his guard. At the ball, the truth came out-he actually thought it was some new method of making plum-puddings, and gave me credit for the woodwork. He had invited two of his brother officers to lunch upon it, and Hood wanted to persuade me that the Cardinal' officer had swallowed one of the skewers! Now, was not this an abominable trick?" The spirit of fun had such a mastery over Hood, that he could not describe any common event to a business correspondent without, accompanying it with a feu de joie of pleasantries, such as it would take a whole battalion of ordinary jokers to produce. "Did I give you the history of a steamer built at Bruges? They quite forget how she was to get down the canal, and they will have to take down the brickwork of the locks at a great expense-some 1,500 francs instead of 25; all along of her width of paddle-boxes. Well, the other day, 10,000 people assembled to see her launched; troops, band, municipals, everybody in their best; "In short, he insisted that, like the and above all, Mr. T, the owner, in blue Otaheitan cooks, I had chewed it small; and jacket, white trousers, and straw hat. So as I happened, having the face-ache, to put he knocked away the props, and then ran as my hand to my jaw at the time, it seemed a for his life, for she ought to have followed; corroboration, of which he made full use. but, instead of that she stuck to the stocks, Upon this hint, he huddled joke upon joke, as if she had the hydrophobia. Then they till we were convulsed with laughter, and to-got two hundred men to run from side to day Franck declares he laughed in the mid- side, and fired cannons from her stern, and dle of the night. Hood called it bullock jam,' and when I asked him what he would eat, he replied, 'What you chews.' . . . I must now tell you my story about the Christmas pudding. The lieutenant was with us on Christmas-day, and enjoyed my plumpudding so much, that I promised to make one, for him. Hood threatened to play some trick with it-either to pop in bullets or tenpenny nails; and I watched over my work-T. H. 553 THIRD SERIES. LIVING AGE. hauled by hawsers; but there she sot,' and the people 'sot' till nine at night, and then gave it up. She has since been launched And nearly succeeded in doing so, innocently assisted by the officer in question, with whom the pudding had not altogether agreed. As he did not know English, and my mother was not yet up in German, a pantomime ensued on his part expresas descriptive of the agonies of an internal skewer." sive of indigestion, but construed, by my father, somehow, but in a quiet way quite. She booked at first very like an investment in the stocks, and I should fear her propensity may lead her next to stick on a bank. The only comfort I could give was, that she promised to be very fast. To heighten the fun, the wine was chucked at her by a young lady who thought she was going; I know not what wine, but it ought to have been still champagne." wiser lesson in the language than is exhibited in that young lady's narrative. The couple of verses, To Minerva, from the Greek, are excellent, and well worthy of a place in the Fragments at the end of these interesting volumes : My temples throb, my pulses boil, I'm sick of Song, and Ode, and BalladSo, Thyrsis, take the Midnight Oil, And pour it on a lobster salad. "My brain is dull, my sight is foul, These laughable epistles are often interspersed with sad intimations of pecuniary embarrassments, and the dread particulars of the progress of that disease, which fixed its crucl claws in him so early, and never left him till the day of his death. Towards But these are by no means equal to a pathe last, the "best things" were written in thetic poem, entitled The Pauper's Christalmost agonies, and nearly all his own por-mas Carol, which appeared in the same tion of the Comic Annual-including the number of Punch as The Song of the Shirt, wonderful wood-cuts-emanated from a sick- and would have been deservedly famous, but bed. He could not write for his magazine for the overshadowing of its still greater which was so largely and graciously eked companion. As a better example, however, out by his brethren of the pen, during that of his peculiar faculty of insinuating sympatime of trouble, as to make us in love with thy under the guise of affected hardness, we literature for the number but one before will conclude with the Lines in Answer to a his death, but he furnished two pictorial Poem entitled "Spring," signed “Pauper,” embellishments" Hood's Mag," a magpie in the Athenæum, which will be new to all with a hawk's hood on; and the "Editor's Apologies," a collection of bottles, leeches, and blisters-the fruits of his sick-room fancy. His own family was the only one which was not delighted with that Annual, well thumbed in every house, which, writes his son, we ourselves "did not enjoy till the lapse of many years had mercifully softened down some of the sad recollections connected with it. The only article that I can remember we ever really thoroughly enjoyed was "Mrs. Gardiner, a Horticultural Romance," and even this was composed in bed. But the illness he was then suffering from was only rheumatic fever, and not one of his dangerous attacks, and he was unusually cheerful." Nevertheless, it is not to be supposed but that Hood's fun was perfectly genuine; the nature of the man was too elastic and genial for any circumstances, however untoward, to depress. It is recorded of him, though not in these volumes, that upon a mustardplaster being applied to his attenuated feet, as he lay in extremity, he was heard feebly to remark, that there was " 'very little meat for the mustard." After all, the works of Thomas Hood that will live the longest are not his humorous pieces. The serious side of his character is even more worthy of attentive admiration; and The Song of the Shirt and The Bridge of Sighs will survive Miss Kilmansegge, although there is no wittier, and scarcely a our readers: "Don't tell me of buds and blossoms, "What right have such as you to dun "Talk of wintry chill and storm Fragrant winds, that blanch your bones! "With seasons what have you to do? If corn doth thrive, or wheat is harmed? OVERSEER. From Fraser's Magazine. weeks, as I ascertain by looking over the reCONCERNING HURRY AND LEISURE. cent pages of my diary. You can never be OH, what a blessing it is to have time to sure whether you have been working hard breathe, and think, and look around one! or not, except by consulting your diary. I mean, of course, that all this is a blessing Sometimes you have an oppressed and wornto the man who has been overdriven: who out feeling of having been overdriven, of has been living for many days in a breath- having done a vast deal during many days less hurry, pushing and driving on, trying past; when lo! you turn to the uncomproto get through his work, yet never seeing mising record, you test the accuracy of your the end of it, not knowing to what task he feeling by that unerring and unimpeachable ought to turn first, so many are pressing standard; and you find that, after all, you upon him altogether. Some folk, I am in- have accomplished very little. The discovformed, like to live in a fever of excitement, ery is mortifying, but it does you good; and and in a ceaseless crowd of occupations: but besides other results, it enables you to see such folk form the minority of the race. Most how very idle and useless people, who keep human beings will agree in the assertion that no diary, may easily bring themselves to it is a horrible feeling to be in a hurry. It believe that they are among the hardestwastes the tissues of the body; it fevers the wrought of mortals. They know they feel fine mechanism of the brain; it renders it weary; they know they have been in a bustle impossible for one to enjoy the scenes of na- and worry; they think they have been in it ture. Trees, fields, sunsets, rivers, breezes, much longer than is the fact. For it is curiand the like, must all be enjoyed at leisure, ous how readily we believe that any strongly if enjoyed at all. There is not the slightest felt state of mind or outward conditionuse in a man's paying a hurried visit to the strongly felt at the present moment—has country. He may as well go there blind- been lasting for a very long time. You have fold, as go in a hurry. He will never see been in very low spirits: you fancy now the country. He will have a perception, no that you have been so for a great portion of doubt, of hedgerows and grass, of green your life, or at any rate for weeks past: you lanes and silent cottages, perhaps of great turn to your diary,-why, eight and forty hills and rocks, of various items which go hours ago you were as merry as a cricket towards making the country; but the coun- during the pleasant drive with Smith, or the try itself he will never see. That feverish cheerful evening that you spent with Snarling. atmosphere which he carries with him will I can well imagine that when some heavy distort and transform even individual ob- misfortune befalls a man, he soon begins to jects; but it will utterly exclude the view of feel as if it had befallen him a long, long the whole. A circling London fog could not time ago: he can hardly remember days do so more completely. For quiet is the which were not darkened by it: it seems to great characteristic and the great charm of have been the condition of his being almost country scenes; and you cannot see or feel since his birth. And so, if you have been quiet when you are not quiet yourself. A toiling very hard for three days-your pen man flying through this peaceful valley in in your hand almost from morning to night an express-train at the rate of fifty miles an perhaps-rely upon it that at the end of hour, might just as reasonably fancy that to those days, save for the uncompromising us, its inhabitants, the trees and hedges diary that keeps you right, you would have seem always dancing, rushing, and circling in your mind a general impression that you about, as they seem to him in looking from had been laboring desperately for a very the window of the flying carriage, as imag- long period for many days, for several ine that, when he comes for a day or two's weeks, for a month or two. After heavy visit, he sees these landscapes as they are rain has fallen for four or five days, all perin themselves, and as they look to their or- sons who do not keep diaries invariably dinary inhabitants. The quick pulse of Lon- think that it has rained for a fortnight. If don keeps with him: he cannot, for a long keen frost lasts in winter for a fortnight, all time, feel sensibly an influence so little start-persons without diaries have a vague belief ling, as faintly flavored, as that of our sim- that there has been frost for a month or six ple country life. We have all beheld some weeks. You resolve to read Alison's valucountry scenes, pleasing but not very strik-able History of the French Revolution (I take ing, while driving hastily to catch a train for for granted you are a young person): you which we feared we should be too late; and go at it every evening for a week. At the afterwards, when we came to know them end of that period you have a vague, uneasy well, how differently they looked! I have been in a hurry. I have been tremendously busy. I have got through an amazing amount of work in the last few impression, that you have been soaked in a sea of platitudes, or weighed down by an incubus of words, for about a hundred years. There is indeed one signal exception to the law of mind which has been noticed: the a very laborious life after all. Who has law, to wit, that if your present state is one that is strongly felt, you naturally fancy that it has lasted much longer than it has actually done. Month by month you re ceive with gratitude a certain periodical whose name it is unnecessary further to particularize. You sit down to read it, having first cut its leaves. You fall into an ecstasy of interest in what you read. And when you return to a state of perception of the outward world, you fancy you have been reading for about ten minutes. You consult your watch: you have been reading for three hours! Need that monthly magazine's name not felt this, in reading the biography of that amiable, able, indefatigable, and overwrought man, Dr. Kitto? He worked himself to death by labor at his desk: but only the reader who has learned by personal experience to feel for him, is likely to see how he did it. be mentioned ? But besides such reasons as these, there are strong arguments why every man should keep a diary. I cannot imagine how many reflective men do not. How narrow and small a thing their actual life must be! They live merely in the present; and the present is only a shifting point, a constantly progressing mathematical line, which parts Every human being, then, who is desirous the future from the past. If a man keeps no of knowing for certain whether he is doing diary, the path crumbles away behind him as much work or little, ought to preserve a his feet leave it; and days gone by are little record of what he does. And such a record, more than a blank, broken by a few disI believe, will in most cases serve to humble torted shadows. His life is all confined him who keeps it, and to spur on to more and within the limits of to-day. Who does not harder work. It will seldom flatter vanity, know how imperfect a thing memory is? It or encourage a tendency to rest on the oars, not merely forgets; it misleads. Things in as though enough had been done. You memory do not merely fade away, preserving must have labored very hard and very con- as they fade their own lineaments so long as stantly indeed, if it looks much in black and they can be seen: they change their aspect, white. And how much work may be ex- they change their place, they turn to somepressed by a few words in a diary! Think thing quite different from the fact. In the of Elihu Burrit's "forged fourteen hours, picture of the past, which memory unaided then Hebrew Bible three hours." Think of by any written record sets before us, the perSir Walter's short memorial of his eight spective is entirely wrong. How capriciously pages before breakfast-and what large and some events seem quite recent, which the closely written pages they were! And how diary shows are really far away; and how much stretch of such minds as they have got unaccountably many things look far away, -how many quick and laborious processes which in truth are not left many weeks beof the mental machinery-are briefly em- hind us! A man might almost as well not balmed in the diaries of humbler and smaller have lived at all as entirely forget that he men, in such entries as "after breakfast, has lived, and entirely forget what he did on walk in garden with children for ten min- those departed days. But I think that alutes; then Article on 10 pp. working hard most every person would feel a great interest from ten till one P.M.; then left off with in looking back, day by day, upon what he bad headache, and very weary "? And did and thought upon that day twelvemonths, don't fancy, reader, that the ten pages thus that day three or five years. The trouble of accomplished are ten pages of the maga- writing a diary is very small. A few lines, a zine; they are ten pages of manuscript, prob- few words, written at the time, suffice, when ably making about three of print. The truth you look at them, to bring all (what Yankees is, you can't represent work by any record of call) the surroundings of that season before it. As yet, there is no way known of photo-you. Many little things come up again, graphing the mind's exertion, and thus pre- which you know quite well you never would serving an accurate memorial of it. You have thought of again but for your glance at might as well expect to find in such a geǹ- those words, and still which you feel you eral phrase as a stormy sea the delineation would be sorry to have forgotten. There of the countless shapes and transformations must be a richness about the life of a person of the waves throughout several hours in who keeps a diary, unknown to other men. several miles of ocean, as think to see in Sir And a million more little links and ties must Walter Scott's eight pages before breakfast bind him to the members of his family circle, an adequate representation of the hard, va- and to all among whom he lives. Life, to ried, wearing-out work that went to turn him looking back, is not a bare line, stringthem off. And so it is, that the diary which ing together his personal identity; it is surrecords the work of a very hard-wrought rounded, intertwined, entangled, with thouman, may very likely appear to careless, sands and thousands of slight incidents, unsympathizing readers, to express not such which give it beauty, kindliness, reality. |