I have a delightful rather than a difficult, or even a delicate duty to perform in speaking of those remains of Hood which are not in the keeping of the graveyard’s silent warders, but in the custody of ever-living generations of men and women. I have at this day no intelligent opinions of Thomas Hood’s ability and achievements to oppose; no detractions from his just and symmetrical fame to rebuke; no reluctant acknowledgments of his mastership to stimulate. The most that can be done now for the dear, dead poet, is to waft his fame, on the breath of honest applause, to circles of men outside of the serried ranks which have already closed in upon his shrine.

It appears from the researches of his children that he was born May 23, 1799.

It rarely happens in the history of genius that the verdict of posterity becomes unanimous within its own generation. Yet, this is true of Thomas Hood. He was, indeed, broadly and lovingly appreciated in life, and he had not been long dead when every murmur of doubt, every dissonance of judgment concerning his kingship among the humorous poets of the nineteenth century, died away. Where now he is not admired and extolled and loved for what he did for letters and humanities, let us charitably suppose he is only not known. Of him it is preËminently true,

I have no hesitation in making my discourse this afternoon his eulogy. If I could not have praised him as a matchless humorist, as a great poet, and as a noble example of manhood, I would have kept silence concerning him.

No name in the literary annals of our century better deserves to be inscribed upon the hearts of the people than does his. He was the friend of the people, and of all the motley he chose to wear, no garb better fitted him, or was more commonly worn, than that of brotherly kindness. This, indeed, he always wore, like a close-fitting tunic, and even when the gay tissues and tinsel of Momus or Harlequin glittered upon the outside, the cerement of charity was between them and his bosom.

The chief reputation Hood achieved in his lifetime was not that which now cleaves to his name. He was known and admired for what is, however admirable in itself, the lesser of his two great gifts. These were wit and poetry, and he shone most to the public eye in the former. I have pronounced him a matchless humorist and a great poet. The proof of my words must be sought in his works.

He was as peculiar in his humor as he was in his character. His passion for punning was never exceeded, perhaps. It would have aroused all the dogmatism of Dr. Johnson’s elephantine nature to explosive indignation against him. Looked at superficially, very much of what Hood wrote appears to be the veriest wantoning of verbal merriment. There are whole volumes of prose and verse, in which he seems to riot in fun, and to ransack the English language for sounds and synonyms of nonsense; but, even in his wildest abandonment to the mood of mirth, there is discoverable a method in his madness, a meaning in his mummery, which is the token of a great brain, throbbing under the jester’s plume, and of a noble heart beating right humanly beneath the mummer’s spangled vest.

The world at first mistook him, no doubt, for a literary harlequin, a poetical pranker, at whose antics they were called upon to laugh only. The admirable humorist lived to see their great mistake rectified, and to behold

“Laughter, holding both his sides,”

not infrequently lift his restraining hands to eyes all suddenly dashed with great blinding tears, or to a bosom growing tempestuous with sighs and throes of human sympathy.

Yet there were not, I think, two distinct sides to Hood’s nature, as some of the earlier critics said, to account for the mysterious pathos welling up from the founts of his wit, but rather a unique single, capable of many manifestations seemingly distinct and diverse, and even antagonistic, but all alike, whether grave or gay, imaginative or practical, comic or tragic—phases only of a homogeneous soul.

It was truly said of him that he introduced comedy and tragedy to each other, and taught them to live together in a cordial union. When his most whimsical poems are scanned, for the discovery, not of their feet, but of their feeling, they reveal his heart beneath the rattling ribs of verbiage.

In that extraordinary poem, “Miss Killmansegg and her Precious Leg,” which to the hasty or over-serious reader seems only a foolish though glittering pageant of rhetorical figures and fancies, a motley troop of “whims and oddities,” there is nevertheless a deep vein of wisdom, which, if visible nowhere else, leads plainly enough to the surface in the terribly grotesque catastrophe. The heroine having lost a member by a casualty, wore instead of it a leg of gold, which she laid under her pillow at night, to keep it from the clutches of her spendthrift lord, who had hinted to her—

Dissensions ripened into quarrels. The countess, in her anger, destroyed her will, which act hastened the dreadful end. That night her sleep was broken;—

And here follows what the poet designates “Her Moral:”—

The bulk of his production is expressed with the same levity which strikes the ear, as in the verses just quoted. He was unquestionably the greatest trafficker in words of double meaning the world had ever known. His stock was exhaustless, and whether home-made or far-fetched, his mots and jeux were sure of currency.

The secret of the perpetual playfulness of his pen is to be found in the eagerness of the public mind to be moved to mirth, and in his need to minister to the mood of the public mind. In a word, he was dependent upon his brain for his bread. Labor was his law, and so, as it befel, humor and mirth became his profits. His puns (so easily spun from himself,) were transmuted into pence and pounds. His quips looked quaintly ahead to quarter-day. His grotesque metaphors were sold in the street, like plaster images, for a livelihood. Had he been less under constraint to please the public ear, he would have wrought, perchance, one dull epic, instead of a thousand delicious epigrams.

His writings are indeed light, but in a double sense. They are light with the buoyancy of the zephyr or of the gossamer wafted in its bosom. They are light also with the luminousness of the sun-beam, kindling beauty and light and warmth as it flashes along its track. The writings of Hood are to be laughed at, but they who only laugh at them have no true appreciation of their subtle power. They disparage them for their mirthfulness, because they can not discover the depths below the dimpling surface of their rolling humor.

His description of a November fog, in London, must be familiar to man y of you, but I will venture to quote it in illustration of his facility in rhyming, and also of his skill in supplying the details of a picture which is all painted only in shadows. It is entitled,

“NOVEMBER.”

Transitions from gay to grave are so much in the manner of Hood that you will not wonder if I sandwich between the playful production of his muse just quoted, and another still more grotesque to follow, an example of his verse, in which the bizarre yields entirely to the beautiful, the tricksy to the true, leaving “a gem of purest ray serene” for the coronal of pastoral poetry. It is the charming idyl,

“RUTH.”

I hoped to find time for quoting one of his numerous ballads, in which he not only displays his facility in punning, and satirizes the lachrymose style of ballad verse prevalent at that period, but I must content myself with reciting the oft-repeated stanza with which one of his best ballads closes, burdened with the fate of Ben, the jilted sailor-boy:—

If I were required to indicate that one of all Hood’s poems in which the humor is the maddest and merriest, I think I should, in spite of embarrassment, choose “the tale of a trumpet,” which, like the story of Miss Kilmansegg, rides double, and carries a moral behind it. Dame Eleanor Spearing, who was too excessively deaf to hear the scandals narrated in her presence, was beset by a peddler, who, with many arts and pleas, prevailed upon her to buy of him a marvelous ear-trumpet. From that time the dame heard sad and shocking tales at the village fire-sides, and, of course, repeated them, until the place was filled with “confusion worse confounded,” and in Hood’s own words:—

The discovery is soon made that the dame’s diabolical trumpet has blown all this mischief, and a condign fate overtakes the unhappy old woman. She is seized by the populace and dragged to the pond just as the peddler who sold her the horn makes his appearance, but—

The moral of the story points itself, but you can afford to listen to the humorist’s quaint phrasing of it:

I did not interrupt the outlines of the story to illustrate its wonderful plethora of puns and pranks, but you will not be averse to a moment’s delay here for a taste of its quaint quality. It is altogether a piece of poetical pyrotechny, in which there are verbal rockets, and serpents, and stars and blue-lights, and double-headers; but, as in many of his poems, the humor seems to go off chiefly with the giddy sparkling whirl and whiz of metrical Catherine wheels. The peddler commends his marvelous trumpet to the dame so marvelously deaf:—

In Hood’s remarkable poems of passion and imagination are to be found, perhaps, his patent of nobility in the realm of poetry. But, if it was made out there, it has had renewal in his later poems of humanity. It was in the last period of his great and restless toil that he flung off, like light fancies, some of his poems, whose stanzas will be echoed in the anthem of his undying fame. Of these are “The Lay of the Laborer,” “The Pauper’s Christmas Carol,” “The Song of the Shirt,” and “The Bridge of Sighs.” It was coincidently with the epoch of that comical and potential journal, Punch, (which has never failed to poke the heavy ribs of oppression, and to prick the great fat paunch of selfishness, in a very lively manner), that this new inspiration of brotherly kindness came to Hood. His troubled heart began to beat itself against the bars of its intellectual prison-house, and to wail out its resistless pleas for the poor, the friendless, and the desolate. “The Song of the Shirt” is one of the most extraordinary lyrics ever struck from the harp of poesy. Little thought he, however, that the lines—which, as they were written by his trembling fingers, were almost as spasmodic as if they had been literally convulsed out of his suffering frame,—little thought he that they would peal out on London’s ear, on England’s ear, and strike deep down into the national heart with a warrant for his immortality, more imperative and universal than any which his wit had framed, or his genius had wrought, from the beginning of his career down to the day on which he sang “The Song of the Shirt.”

“Now, mind, Hood, mark my words, this will tell wonderfully: it is the best thing you ever did,” said his wife, as she folded the manuscript for the pocket of Punch. And “tell” it did, for not only did England make it a household ballad, but France and Germany and Italy, even, engrafted it upon their popular anthology, while here, in the New World, we bear its odd burden,—

not more in our memories than in our hearts. Let us not forget, moreover, that women,

sent their shillings from their scanty earnings all over England to help sculpture the pale marble that covers poor Hood on Kensall Green.

Quite as remarkable as the song I have just dismissed is “The Bridge of Sighs.” It withstood the ponderous assaults of dull-headed and cold-hearted critics when it was builded, and now its somber arches will span the deep river of the popular feeling forever and ever. It is a marvelously tender ode, a rare carol of charity, warbled out fearlessly, where prudish philanthropy would have drawn down its hood and held its breath, lest, perchance, it should seem at the side of a fallen woman. Now may the world lift up its head and exult that sorrow, shame, and despair have found a champion, whose voice over the

echoes the divine verdict of Jesus of Nazareth over the sinful woman brought to him for the stern judgment of Moses, “Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone.”

Much remains unsaid that I would fain say. But it is time for me to close. And what words shall I choose for last words concerning my subject, who, if he were indeed my subject, would make me doubly royal, for was not he the crowned king of kindly wits?

He did not live to laugh, albeit he often laughed to live. There is, indeed, a marvel to us in his exterior mirthfulness, for he had a deep fount of sadness in his soul. The last lines of his magnificent “Ode to Melancholy” afford us the key to his inner nature:

Yet had he wept where he has laughed, had he poured forth bile instead of humor, had he exhaled dull vapors instead of fancies, he might have made a few miserable, but the many he has made glad would have missed the blessed sunshine of his song and spirit.

So, for his “Lays,” that yet lift us up; for his “Whims,” that we are but too happy to indulge; for his oddities that we even admire; for his “Own,” which is yet far more ours than his; for his “Designs,” which were never against any one’s piece but his own; for his “Pleas,” which pleased all classes of his clients; for his “Puns,” with which folly alone was punished; for his spirit, which was always of highest “proof” on trial; for his wit, which, witnessed of another’s, as Shakspere says, “it ambles, it goes easily;” for his worth, that had a morning and a noon tide, though it was never (k)nighted; for his heart, which in the chase of charity, was never be-hind; for his name, which is a covering of honor and a crown of bays;—for all these things, be blessings on the name and memory of Thomas Hood. [Great applause.]

Dr. Vincent said: I am surprised and delighted to learn that about seventy members of the C. L. S. C. went out after fossils with Colonel Daniels before breakfast this morning. I am very glad to learn that so many of our circle are interested in this department of study.

The members of the C. L. S. C. are most of them women, or a very large part of them women, and they hear on this ground a good many things said affecting woman’s sphere and work, and they hear in the course of the conversation a great many things said which may not be altogether true, in reference to the sentiments prevailing at Chautauqua concerning this question of woman’s work and woman’s sphere. I was very glad to know that opportunity was taken the other day to discuss one side of that question, and I am very glad that opportunity was given to discuss the other side this afternoon. We must remember in all this discussion, that the largest liberty is granted to all members of the C. L. S. C., that those who believe in woman’s suffrage, and those who are opposed to woman’s suffrage, may be equally loyal to the great objects of the Circle. One thing, however, must be said, that if woman is depreciated as to her relative social power, influence, or value by the managers of the Circle, they are not worthy of your confidence. For the Circle which proposes to exalt the home, and increase the intellectual power of woman as mother, and as a member of society, should certainly recognize as a fundamental doctrine woman’s equality in every legitimate respect with man. [Great applause.] And, if opportunity affords for the further discussion of this question, I hope we shall be able to avail ourselves of the opportunity, and have a thorough understanding among all members of the C. L. S. C. as to where those of us who are most devoted to its interests stand on these questions. I make these remarks, in as indefinite a way as I can, that through the mists you may catch the spirit of the hour, and not mistake the true sentiment of the Chautauqua Circle. [Applause.]

Adjourned.