We have seen a little girl, eight years old,
laugh as if her heart would break, in merely looking at the pictures in
a volume of Hood. The printed page she did not read or care to read;
what the prints illustrated she knew nothing about; but her eyes danced
with joy and overran with tears of childish merriment. But in all this
luxury of fun, whether by pen or pencil, no word, idea, image, or
delineation obscures the transparency of innocence, or leaves the shadow
of a stain upon the purest mind. To be at the same time so comic and so
chaste is not only a moral beauty, but a literary wonder. It is hard to
deal with the oddities of humor, however carefully, without casual slips
that may offend or shame the reverential or the sensitive. Noble, on the
whole, as Shakspeare was, we would not in a mixed company, until after
cautious rehearsal, venture to read his comic passages aloud. We may
apply the statement, also, to the comic portions of Burns,--and,
indeed, to comic literature in general. But who has fear to read most
openly anything that Hood ever wrote? or who has a memory of wounded
modesty for anything that he ever read secretly of Hood's? Dr. Johnson
says that dirty images were as natural to Swift as sublime ones were to
Milton;--we may say that images at once lambent and laughable were those
which were natural to Hood. Even when his mirth is broadest, it is
decent; and while the merest recollection of his drollery will often
convulse the face in defiance of the best-bred muscles, no thought
arises which the dying need regret.
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