Thomas Hood

“ There is no breeze to die on;
And all their drums and trumpets, flutes and harps,
Could never cut their way with ev’n three sharps
Through such a fog as this, you may rely on.
I think, but am not sure, I hear a hum,
Like a very muffled double drum,
And then a something faintly shrill,
Like Bartlemy Fair’s old buz at Pentonville.
And now and then hear a pop,
As if from Pedley’s Soda Water shop.
I’m almost ill with the strong scent of mud,
And, not to mention sneezing,
My cough is, more than usual, teasing;
I really fear that I have chill’d my blood,
O Lud! O Lud! O Lud! O Lud! ”

“ Take care of your pocket!—take care of your pocket!
You’ll sleep at great inns, in the smallest of beds,
Find charges as apt to mount up as a rocket,
With thirty per cent. as a tax on your heads,—
Take care of your pocket!—take care of your pocket!
You’ll see old Cologne,—not the sweetest of towns,—
Wherever you follow your nose you will shock it;
And you’ll pay your three dollars to look at three crowns,—
Take care of your pocket!—take care of your pocket!
You’ll count seven Mountains, and see Roland’s Eck,
Hear legends veracious as any by Crockett ”

“ For her head, her brains, her body, and legs,
Her life’s not worth a copper!
Willy-nilly,
In Piccadilly,
A hundred hearts turn sick and chilly,
A hundred voices cry, “Stop her!”
And one old gentleman stares and stands,
Shakes his head and lifts his hands,
And says, “How very improper!”
On and on!—what a perilous run!
The iron rails seem all mingling in one,
To shut out the Green Park scenery!
And now the Cellar its dangers reveals.
She shudders—she shrieks—she’s doom’d, she feels,
To be torn by powers of horses and wheels,
Like a spinner by steam machinery! ”

“ A BUTCHER.
HOE’ER has gone thro’ London Street,
Has seen a Butcher gazing at his meat,
And how he keeps
Gloating upon a sheep’s
Or bullock’s personals, as if his own;
How he admires his halves,
And quarters—and his calves,
As if in truth upon his own legs grown;—
His fat! his suet!
His kidneys peeping elegantly thro’ it!
His thick flank!
And his thin!
His shank!
His shin!
Skin of his skin, and bone too of his bone!
With what an air
He stands aloof, across the thoroughfare
Gazing—and will not let a body by,
Tho’ buy! buy! buy! be constantly his cry ”

“ The light sylph-like garments, so tenderly pinn’d,
That blew into shape, and embodied the wind!
There was white on the grass—there was white on the spray—
Her garden—it look’d like a garden of May!
But now all is dark—not a shirt’s on a shrub—
You’ve ruined her prospects in life, Mr. Scrub!
You’ve ruin’d her custom—now families drop her—
From her silver reduced—nay, reduced from her copper!
The last of her washing is done at her eye,
One poor little kerchief that never gets dry! ”

“ He look’d so lone, and so unwived,
That soon the Widow Cross contrived
To fall in love with even that band;
And all at once the brackish juices
Came gushing out thro’ sorrow’s sluices—
Tear after tear too fast to wipe,
Tho’ sopp’d, and sopp’d, and sopp’d again—
No leak in sorrow’s private pipe,
But like a bursting on the main!
Whoe’er has watch’d the window-pane—
I mean to say in showery weather—
Has seen two little drops of rain,
Like lovers very fond and fain,
At one another creeping, creeping,
Till both, at last, embrace together:
So far’d it with that couple’s weeping! ”

“ If your suds will not cool, and a mere simple stranger,
Both to you and to washing, may put in a rub,—
O wipe out your Amazon arms from the tub,—
And lend me your ear,—Let me modestly plead
For a race that your labours may soon supersede—
For a race that, now washing no living affords—
Like Grimaldi must leave their aquatic old boards,
Not with pence in their pockets to keep them at ease,
Not with bread in the funds—or investments of cheese,
But to droop like sad willows that lived by a stream,
Which the sun has suck’d up into vapour and steam. ”

“ Some want a German row,
Some wish a Russian war;
I care not—I’m at peace,
So I have my cigar.
I never see the Post,
I seldom read the Star;
The Globe I scarcely heed,
So I have my cigar.
They tell me that Bank Stock
Is sunk much under par;
It’s all the same to me,
So I have my cigar.
Honours have come to men
My juniors at the Bar;
No matter—I can wait,
So I have my cigar.
Ambition frets me not;
A cab or glory’s car
Are just the same to me,
So I have my cigar.{405}
I worship no vain gods,
But serve the household Lar;
I’m sure to be at home,
So I have my cigar. ”

“ And now the fretting foaming tide
He steer’d away to cross;
The bounding pinnace play’d a game
Of dreary pitch and toss;
A game that, on the good dry land,
Is apt to bring a loss!
V.
Good Heaven befriend that little boat,
And guide her on her way!
A boat, they say, has canvas wings,
But cannot fly away!
Though, like a merry singing-bird,
She sits upon the spray!
VI.
Still east by south the little boat,
With tawny sail, kept beating:
Now out of sight, between two waves,
Now o’er th’ horizon fleeting:
Like greedy swine that feed on mast,—
The waves her mast seem’d eating! ”

“ Thou hast smoothed, alas, the path to the Old Bailey!
And to the stony bowers
Of Newgate, to encourage the approach,
By caravan or coach,—
Hast strewed the way with flints as soft as flowers.
Who shall dispute thy name!
Insculpt in stone in every street,
We soon shall greet
Thy trodden down, yet all unconquered fame!
Where’er we take, even at this time, our way,
Nought see we, but mankind in open air,
Hammering thy fame, as Chantrey would not dare;—
And with a patient care
Chipping thy immortality all day! ”

“ It’s very hard, by land or sea
Some strange event I court,
But nothing ever comes to me
That’s worth a pen’s report:
It really made my temper chafe,
Each coast that I was at,
I vow’d, and rail’d, and came home safe,—
There’s no Romance in that!
The only time I had a chance
At Brighton one fine day,
My chestnut mare began to prance,
Took fright, and ran away;
Alas! no Captain of the Tenth
To stop my steed came pat;
A Butcher caught the rein at length,—
There’s no Romance in that!
Love—even love—goes smoothly on
A railway sort of track—
No flinty sire, no jealous Don! ”

“ O, say, accomplished artist!
Was it thy purpose, by a scene so quizzical,
To read a wholesome lesson to the Chartist,
So over partial to the means called Physical,
Sticks, staves, and swords, and guns, the tools of treason?
To show, illustrating the better course,
The very Brutes abandoning Brute Force,
The worry and the fight,
The bark and bite,
In which, says Doctor Watts, the dogs delight,
And lending shaggy ears to Law and Reason,
As uttered in that Court of high antiquity
Where sits the Chancellor, supreme as Pope,
But works—so let us hope—
In equity, not iniquity? ”

“ There goes a happy wight,
Inimical to spleen and spite,
And careless of all care;
Who oils the ruffled waves of strife,
And makes the work-day suit of life
Of very easy wear.
Lord! if he had some people’s ills
To cope—their hungry bonds and bills,
How faintly they would tease;
Things that have cost both tears and sighs{476}—
Their foes, as motelings in his eyes—
Their duns, his summer fleas!
The stage, I guess, is not thy school—
Thou dost not antic like the fool
That wept behind his mask;
Thy playing is thy play—a sport—
A revel, as perform’d at Court,
And not a trade—a task! ”

“ A sprout of cabbage, green and raw,
Protruded,—as the Dove, so stanch
For Peace, supports an olive branch,—
Her very grunt, so low and mild,
Like the soft snoring of a child,
Inquiring into his disquiets,
Served like the Riot Act, at riots,—
He laid his restive bristles flatter,
And took to arguefy the matter.
“O Bess, O Bess, here’s heavy news!
They mean to ‘mancipate the Jews!
Just as they turn’d the blacks to whites,
They want to give them equal rights,
And, in the twinkling of a steeple,
Make Hebrews quite like other people. ”

“ Directly I open my eyes, I can’t help calling out Sweep
As natural as the sparrows among the chimbley-pots that say Cheep!
For my own part I find my suppress’d voice very uneasy,
And comparable to nothing but having your tissue stopt when you are sneezy.
Well, it’s all up with us! tho’ I suppose we mustn’t cry all up.
Here’s a precious merry Christmas, I’m blest if I can earn either bit or sup!
If crying Sweep, of mornings, is going beyond quietness’s border,
Them as pretends to be fond of silence oughtn’t to cry hear, hear, and order, order. ”

“ Thof I cant sea What Prospectives and washing has with one another to Do—
It ant as if a Bird’seye Hankicher can take a Birds-high view!
But Thats your look-out—I’ve not much to do with that—But pleas God to hold up fine,
Id show you caps and pinners and small things as lillywhit as Ever crosst the Line
Without going any Father off than Little Parodies Place,
And Thats more than you Can—and Ill say it behind your face—
But when Folks talks of washing, it ant for you too Speak,—
As kept Dockter Pattyson out of his Shirt for a Weak! ”

“ I thought the very Old One was come
To mock me before my death,
And wish’d I had buried the dead men’s bones
That were lying about the heath!
But the beggar gave me a jolly clap—
“Come, let us pledge each other,
For all the wide world is dead beside,
And we are brother and brother—
I’ve a yearning for thee in my heart,
As if we had come of one mother.
“I’ve a yearning for thee in my heart
That almost makes me weep,
For as I pass’d from town to town
The folks were all stone-asleep,—
But when I saw thee sitting aloft,
It made me both laugh and leap!” ”

“ Can have to do with learning.
Alas! my learning once drew cash,
But public fame’s unstable,
So I must turn a pig again,
And fatten for the table.
To leave my literary line
My eyes get red and leaky;
But Giblett doesn’t want me blue,
But red and white, and streaky.
Old Mullins used to cultivate
My learning like a gard’ner;{103}
But Giblett only thinks of lard,
And not of Doctor Lardner!
He does not care about my brain
The value of two coppers,
All that he thinks about my head
Is, how I’m off for choppers. ”

“ Lawk help me, I don’t know where to look, or to run, if I only knew which way—
A child as is lost about London streets, and especially Seven Dials, is a needle in a bottle of hay.
I am all in a quiver—get out of my sight, do, you wretch, you little Kitty M’Nab!
You promised to have half an eye on him, you know you did, you dirty deceitful young drab.
The last time as ever I see him, poor thing, was with my own blessed Motherly eyes,
Sitting as good as gold in the gutter, a playing at making little dirt pies. ”

“ To sing together till they scare the walls
Of old St. Paul’s,
Sitting in red, grey, green, blue, drab, and white,
Some say a gratifying sight,
Tho’ I think sad—but that’s a schism—
To witness so much pauperism—
Suppose, I say, the Bishop then, to make
In this poor overcrowded world more room,
Proposed to shake
Down that immense extinguisher, the dome—
Some humane Martin in the charity Gal-way
I fear would come and interfere,
Save beadle, brat, and overseer,
To walk back in their parish shoes,
In too, too many two-and-twos,
Islington—Wapping—or Pall Mall way! ”