earnest and instinctive nature. We could quote enough in confirmation
of this assertion to make a moderate volume. And then the large and
charitable wisdom, which in Hood's genius makes the teacher humble
in order to win the learner, we value all the more that it conceals
authority in the guise of mirth, and under the coat of motley or the
mantle of extravagance insinuates effective and salutary lessons.

No writer has ever so successfully as Hood combined the grotesque
with the terrible. He has the art, as no man but himself ever had, of
sustaining the illusion of an awful or solemn narrative through a long
poem, to be closed in a catastrophe that is at once unexpected and
ludicrous. The mystification is complete; the secret of the issue is
never betrayed; suspense is maintained with Spartan reticence; curiosity
is excited progressively to its utmost tension; and the surprise at the
end is oftentimes electric. "A Storm at Hastings" and "The Demon
Ship" are of this class. But sometimes the terrible so prevails as to
overpower the ludicrous, or rather, it becomes more terrible by the very
presence of the ludicrous. We have evidence of this in the poem called
"The Last Man." Sometimes we find the idea of the supernatural added to
the ludicrous with great moral and imaginative effect. Observe with
what pathetic tenderness this is done in the "Ode to the Printer's
Devil,"--with what solemn moral power in "The Tale of a Trumpet,"--and
with what historical satire and social insight in "The Knight and the
Dragon." Sometimes the ludicrous element entirely disappears, and we
have the purely terrible,--the terrible in itself, as in "The Tower of
Lahneck,"--the terrible in pathos, as in "The Work-House Clock,"--the
terrible in penitence and remorse, as in "The Lady's Dream,"--the
terrible in temptation and despair, as in "The Dream of Eugene Aram."

Hood, as we have seen, is a perfect master equally of the grotesque and