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feeling and the same incapacity to render it into poetry. Nowhere in all this fluent and specious versification is there more than such improvisations as the 'hurried life' of a professional man is likely to leave time for.

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THE life of William Thom was full of misery and distraction. He endured all the agonies of poverty and privation, with intervals during which he was feasted in London as a celebrity, and received large sums in charity from admirers in America and in India. He once said to his hosts at a dinner: 'I retire to my loom, gentlemen, and those who would best serve me, buy my webs.' He appears to have been a good weaver, but not a thrifty one. At nearly the age of fifty he speaks of himself, quite justly, as 'not yet come to years of discretion'; he lived not without a certain disorder, having his own way in his habits and morals. But there is no doubt that this random, reckless, defiant creature was a man of unusual force and charm, and a man who can characterise his feelings as he goes away from his wife's burial as 'a trifle of sad thinking,' is not without that sense of style which comes from some fineness of mind. Personally, we are told, he was small, thickset, and somewhat lame, with 'a face which was creased and wrinkled all over, wherever a wrinkle could be, and had an expression at once shrewd, humorous, insinuating, and woebegone.' The description suggests the actual qualities of his work, in which many strange contradictions are not less strangely harmonised.

Thom was an instinctive artist, and though he imagined that he had learned largely from his 'ill-fated fellow-craftsman,' Tannahill, and though he certainly and naturally learned from Burns, he discovered for himself a kind of finish, a technique

1 Rhymes and Recollections, 1844.

that seems really elaborate, and is far beyond that of any other Scots-writing lyric poet of the time. His sense of rhythm and of epithet is equally certain and unusual. Something which we rarely find in Scottish verse (or only in Burns, who had everything) gives a curious quality to Thom's work: a tender irony, which mixes with deep human feeling and with an almost playful sense of the beauty of things and sounds. This irony sometimes turns fierce, and can be as grim as in the biting ballad of the nettle and the 'stricken branch.' It gives salt to sympathy, and adds finish, a kind of mental distinction, to poems that tend to go the Scots way down to sentimentality.

Like most Scottish poets, Thom sought for much of his inspiration, or for adequate forms for it, in the national airs, to which his musical sense guided him. There is one instance, which he has set down in one of those notes which supplement the masterly prose 'Recollections,' in which even he could not better what he called 'a most romping stamping tune, with neither time nor measure' (though it had both), and which I must record here for the joy of it:

'Did ye meet my wife, Jenny Nettle, Jenny Nettle?
Did ye meet my wife, coming frae the market?

A bag o' meal upon her back,

A bag o' meal upon her back,

A bag o' meal upon her back,
And a bairnie in a basket.'

But look at almost every poem of Thom and you will find a rhythm in which the cadences are elaborated and variously balanced, and in which lilt and alliteration combine to produce a rare singing music, not usually of pure beauty, but with something strange, strong, often grotesque in it. There are artful breaks, like the repetition, outside the normal meain

sure,

'That waur green, green when he was near me.'

Sometimes the turns and pauses are mere effects of harmony, oftener they are all for meaning, but a meaning which

seems to evoke sound in its own image. A satirical poem called 'Chants for Churls,' written at the time of the birth of the Free Church, would be a pure delight, read properly, to one who did not even grasp the sense of the not too difficult words. Has Mr. Kipling ever done so much with the hammer and anvil as this:

'We've kirks in ilka corner,
An' wow but we can preach!
Timmer tap, little sap,
Onything for bread.

Their sermons in the draw-well,

Drink till ye stretch.

We're clean sairt sookin' at it,

The deil's dazed lookin' at it,

Daud him on the head!'

There is hardly a poem which has not its own lilt, and an epithet or two which come as if by surprise. The feeling often passes beyond mere personal record, and becomes almost dramatic. 'In my very very heart I found it,' he could say of any of his poems, in the true sense, and he asks indignantly: 'Who are they that beat about in the substanceless regions of fancy for material to move a tear?' He was 'a man who had something to say,' it was rightly said of him by one of his first and best critics. Yet what is after all chiefly remarkable in him is the rare, almost unerring, art of his verse, which, as the work of a lame, drunken, flute-playing weaver, is not less than astonishing.

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HOOD is one of the great artists in English verse, especially

1 (1) Odes and Addresses to Great People, with J. H. Reynolds (who wrote five), 1825. (2) Whims and Oddities, in Prose and Verse, 2 vols., 182627. (3) The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, 1827. (4) Epping Hunt, 1829. (5) The Dream of Eugene Aram, 1831. (6) Hood's Own, 1839. (7) Whimsicalities, 1844. (8) Memorials, edited by his Daughter, 1860. (9) Miss Kilmansegg, 1870. (10) Complete Works, 11 vols., 1882–84. (11) The Haunted House, 1886. (12) Complete Poetical Works, edited by Walter Jerrold, 1906.

in his serious play with double and treble endings. No one else could have written such a stanza as this:

'Still, for all slips of hers,

One of Eve's family -
Wipe those poor lips of hers
Oozing so clammily.'

The rhymes would be laughable if Hood's sensitive finger had not trembled on them and touched them into pathos. His verse has a strong beat, as in 'The Song of the Shirt,' in which a certain poise and weight are given to a lilt, something as Campbell did, but with an artifice more obvious, in 'The Battle of the Baltic.' He uses repetitions and refrains with less artifice than Poe, who must have learnt the exact shape of certain metres from him; and he has a musical art, unique in him, of getting crescendos, sometimes by an unexpected new line added with sudden effect to a refrain, like that which ends and intensifies 'The Song of the Shirt.' At moments he leaves all that is peculiar, and what is most personal in his verse, to fall into older-fashioned cadences as satisfying as these, both funereal:

'Saving those two that turn aside and pass,
In velvet blossom, where all flesh is grass';

and, more mental in its picture:

'When grass waves

Over the past-away, there may be then
No resurrection in the minds of men.'

And he has a quality, so simple and straightforward that it is hardly distinguishable from prose, which allows him to say at times final and perfect things like the famous:

'We thought her dying when she slept

And sleeping when she died.'

It becomes didactic, but does not lose its sharpness and neat

ness,

in:

'But evil is wrought by want of thought

As well as want of heart.'

An art of saying almost unforgettable things is part of his various skill, and belongs to the antithetical mind, which turns easily from a pun to a moral contrast.

Hood learnt, in form, matter, and subject, from several of his contemporaries; metrically, no doubt, from Coleridge, who, he tells us with pride, was 'friendly to my rhyme'; and, in epithets and natural colour from Keats, whose 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' he echoes closely in the ballad of 'The Water Lady,' while the closing imagery of the 'Ode on Melancholy' is almost transferred to his own 'Ode to Autumn.' Lamb, whom he honoured nobly, he comes sometimes to resemble, but, in verse, for the better; so that the little cameo-like poem of 'Ruth,' so tender, finished, and restrained, is really what Lamb would like to have done, but was never quite to accomplish. At his best, Hood has a style which seems to come to him naturally, and to suit his needs; but he invented another style by the way, of which the main ingredients were Elizabethan.

It is difficult sometimes to know how far Shakespeare, or one of the melodious minor people of his time, is being consciously followed in the cadences of some of the longer poems. "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies' is full of sweet fancy, woven with a pleasant ingenuity, after one of the manners of the narrative poets of our Renaissance. 'Hero and Leander' is done after a slightly different manner, and its sophisticated feeling would have been understood by the people who came after Marlowe, and began to embroider upon a plain outline. 'Lycus the Centaur,' with its swaying metre, is a kind of classical extravaganza, and here the curious sympathy for what is unhuman in things, for the unearthliness of fairies, sea-nymphs, and Circe's beasts, perhaps culminates. Tragic mischief, which in the others was of a graver kind, becomes here almost a horrible thing, into which he puts beauty.

Yet in all this, with its charm, strangeness, and a kind of

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