Thomas Hood

“ A crook becomes a shepherdess.
HUGGINS.
When Peggy’s dog her arms imprison,
I often wish my lot was hisn;
How often I should stand and turn,
To get a pat from hands like hern.
DUGGINS.
I tell Sall’s lambs how blest they be,
To stand about and stare at she;
But when I look, she turns and shies,
And won’t bear none but their sheep’s-eyes!
[Pg 100]
HUGGINS.
Love goes with Peggy where she goes.—
Beneath her smile the garden grows;
Potatoes spring, and cabbage starts,
’Tatoes have eyes, and cabbage hearts!
DUGGINS.
Where Sally goes it’s always spring,
Her presence brightens every thing ”

“ That’s the gentleman, without his castor, nor indeed overwell togged otherwise for wet weather—with his beard lather’d but not shaved—standing up in an oyster-shell drag, and attempting, like a sorry whip as he is, to tool his team of bokickers with a potato-fork. Did you ever see four such unbroke brutes as he hath to keep together—neither reined-up, nor down, nor indeed, any ribbons to hold at all—and as I would have laid a pony to nothing, there they go, no pace at all, cause why? they are just come to some invisible sea obelisk, and each horse is for going down a road of his own. ”

“ Oh, honest, good, dear Pilot, as you love a distressed poor countryman—as you understand the compass and how rudders are turned—if you know what a rope’s end is,—take the biggest bit of a cable you can pick, and give yonder Dutch sea-calves a round dozen a piece; ’twill cost you no great pains, seeing they are tied up ready to your hand. Pish! never mind their offence; they have mutinied against themselves. Smite, and spare not. I will go ashore meanwhile, in your boat. Hollo there! help me down. Take heed to my footing. Catch me, all of you, in your arms. Now I am in. No, I an’t! I an’t! ”

“ By way of clincher, Fate, who never does things by halves, whilst foredooming me incapable of standing my ground at sea, has also denied me the power of settling it. A camp-stool is sure to decamp with me; a chair, as if it stood on Siberian ice, suddenly throws itself on its back, and behold me in an extempore sledge! Barrels roll from under me; coils of rope shuffle me off. Even on the plain bare hard deck, or cabin floor, I throw demi-summersets, as if I had been returned to Parliament to represent the Antipodes by sitting on the back of my head. ”

“ Your bacon grows rusty in your mouth, and your table-beer turns to vinegar on your palate. You cannot sleep at night, or work by day. You have no heart for anything. You can hardly drag one clouted shoe after another. And how do you look? Why, as pale as a parsnip, and as thin as a hurdle, and your carroty locks stand bolt upright as if you had just met old Lawson’s ghost with his head under his arm. I say thus you must feel and look, Bushell, if what the well-dressed vagabond told you is the truth. ”

“ I CANNOT conceive any prospect more agreeable to a weary traveller than the approach to Bedfordshire. Each valley reminds him of Sleepy Hollow, the fleecy clouds seem like blankets, the lakes and ponds are clean sheets; the setting sun looks like a warming-pan. He dreams of dreams to come. His travelling-cap transforms to a night-cap, the coach lining feels softlier squabbed; the guard’s horn plays “Lullaby.” Every flower by the road-side is a poppy. Each jolt of the coach is but a drowsy stumble up stairs. The lady opposite is the chamber-maid; the gentleman beside her is Boots. ”

“ There is no washing put out here, I perceive; ’tis all done at home. What a complex, chaotic motion,—the ship tosses and flings like a wild desert-born horse, that is trying to rear, kick up behind, turn round and round, and roll on his back at one and the same moment. This is no Dutch ship, but a Dutch fair—with the drums, gongs, speaking-trumpets, and other discords, all braying together; and I am on the rocking-horse, the round-about, in the up-and-down, and each of the swings, all at once! Another crash! The Jung Vrouw is bereaved of her little one, alias the long-boat. ”

“ I can keep nothing to myself: you shall have my whole heart. I abhor, loathe, execrate, the sea! If I could throw up my hat, my cry would be “Land for ever!” A fico for Tom Tough! Down with Duncan Howe, and Jervis! No Dibdin!
If ever I get ashore, able to chalk upon a wall, you shall read—Ask for Stoke Pogis! Try Lupton Parva! If ever I get to a dry desk again, to write verse upon,—and the poetry of the ocean is all on the land, its prose only upon the sea, you shall have a rare new melody, published by Power, to some such strain as this:—
The sea! ”

“ His skin is fair, but his lining is utter dark; his eyes are like shotten stars,—mere jellies; or like mock-painted windows since the tax upon daylight: what his mind’s eye can be, is yet a mystery with the learned, or if he hath a mental capacity at all—for, “out of sight is out of mind.”
Wherever he stands, he is antipodean, with his midnight to your noon. The brightest sunshine serves only to make him the gloomier object; like a dark house at a general illumination. When he stirs, it is like a Venetian blind, being pulled up and down by a string ”

“ What means that dreadful cry? Our death-bell is tolling in Dutch—“Del, del, is verlooren!”
I must scramble, crawl, haul myself, spite of my sprained ankles, up unto the deck how I may. Next best unto witnessing our own funeral is the seeing how we are done to death.
What a sight! Here is the tiller tied hard a-port, or hard a-lee, as hard as they can tie it. Further back is the Skipper himself, entangled dismally by some cord or other to the stern-rails; and yonder is his mate, with a hundred and fifty turns of rope round himself and the mizen-mast, which he seems trying to strengthen. ”

“ The Houses could not have been properly protected—if they had been watched as well as they were lighted—but it is too late to cast any blame on individuals. A paltry spirit of economy has been our bane. A few shillings would have purchased a watch-dog; and one or two geese in each house might have saved the capitol of the constitution! But the incendiary knew how to choose his time—an adjournment when there were none sitting.
I say incendiary, because no doubt can exist in any cool mind, that enters into the conflagration. ”

“ But the mind of the forlorn Malchen was occupied with any thing but oysters; it was fixed upon things above, or at least overhead. “I do not think I can sit up all night,” she murmured, concluding with such a gape that the tears squeezed out plentifully between her fat little eyelids.
“I’ve found only one bad one—and that was full of black mud—schloo—oo—oo—ooop!”—slirropped honest Dietrich. N. B. There is no established formula of minims and crotchets on the gamut to represent the swallowing of an oyster: so the aforesaid syllables of “schloo—oo—oo—ooop,” must stand in their stead. ”

“ Our German beds are not intended to carry double, and in such an obscure out-of-the way village as Kleinewinkel, who would think of finding any thing better in the way of a couch than a sort of box just too little for a bed, and just too large for a coffin? It was between two such bedlings, then, that Madame Doppeldick was standing, when she broke out into the aforesaid exclamation—“I am perfectly at my wits’ ends!” ”

“ Here’s a body—there’s a bed!
There’s a pillow—here’s a head!
There’s a curtain—here’s a light!
There’s a puff—and so Good Night!
It would have been gross improvidence to waste more words on the occasion; for I was to be roused up again at four o’clock the next morning to proceed by the early coach. I determined, therefore, to do as much sleep within the interval as I could; and in a minute, short measure, I was with that mandarin, Morpheus, in his Land of Nod.
How intensely we sleep when we are fatigued! Some as sound as tops, others as fast as churches. ”

“ To be sure the Doctor likes weight of metal, and fires away with the high-soundingest words he can get, whereby his meaning is apt to loom bigger than it is, like a fishing-boat in a fog; and where there’s such a ground swell of language, a seaman is apt to think there’s no great depth of ideas; but bating that, there’s nothing to shake a rope’s end at, but quite the reverse, especially as to teaching the youngsters to give three cheers for their king and country. ”

“ When one is confessing, there is no place under the sun like the Ocean for “making a clean breast of it:”—and am not I here staggering and tumbling—soberly tipsy—aboard a lubberly Dutch-built hull, becalmed in a heavy swell—dreaming, when I can sleep, that I am a barrel-churn, revolving with my inside full of half-turned cream or incipient butter;—and finding, when I awake, that dreams do not go so altogether by contraries? ”

“ If you’ve only done your duty, you’ve no right to beg pardon—and I’ve no right to ask it. All I mean to say is, here am I in Holyhead instead of Dublin. I don’t care what that fat fellow says—who don’t understand his own rights. I stick to all I said before. I have no right to be up in the Moon, have I? Of course not—and I’ve no more right to stand on this present quay, than I have to be up in the Moon! ”

“ The sand—O Lord! to stop my mouth! how every thing is planned!
BOATMAN.
The handspike, Bill—quick, bear a hand! now Ma’am, just step ashore!
MRS. F.
What! an’t I going to be kill’d—and welter’d in my gore?
Well, Heaven be praised! but I’ll not go a sailing any more!
A SPENT BALL. “The flying ball.”—GRAY.
A BALL is a round, but not a perpetual round, of pleasure. It spends itself at last, like that from the cannon’s mouth; or rather, like that greatest of balls, “that great globe itself,” is “dissolved with all that it inherits.” ”

“ The Jung Vrouw was a Quakeress to her! At every [Pg 294] jump she takes, my heart leaps also. Pray, pray, pray take in some canvas. You think you be sailing, but you are committing suicide. They mind me no more than stones. Oh! oh! I am out of Danger’s frying-pan into its fire! Peter Stuckey will be a murtherer after all!
What a set of dare-devils! They grin like baboons whilst she is driving with half her deck under water! I will shut mine eyes and hold fast by something. I am worse than ever. I give myself up. Oh! oh! what an awful roaring, hissing, grinding noise we are come into! ”

“ Why, my feelings are as tough—and not without need—as a bull-beef steak fresh killed, and take quite as much pitching into before they’re as tender as you suppose. Likely it is, that a man who has rammed his head, as I have in Africa, into a stuck camel for a secondhand swig at his cistern, would come within sixty degrees of the notion of pitying a lubberly school-boy for having as much as ever he could swill of sour swipes! Then for bad food, the stinkingest beef I ever met with was none to be had, good or bad, except the smell of the empty barrel. ”

“ Neither could she help hearing some such shocking ill-bred remarks as, “Vy don’t the frizzle-vigged old Guy get into the gemman’s drag?” Still the pride of the Normans sustained her. She seemed to draw a sort of supplementary neck out of her bosom, and sat more rigidly erect than ever, occasionally favouring the circle, like a mad bull at bay, with a most awful threatening look, accompanied ever by the same five words:
“I CHOOSE to be alone.”
It is easy to say choose, but more difficult to have one’s choice. The blackberry boys chose to remain ”

“ The daughter droops; art has had her Almack’s, and nature establishes a Free and Easy. Grace throws herself, skow-wow any-how, on an ottoman, and Good Breeding crosses her legs. Roses begin to relax, and Curls to unbend themselves; the very Candles seem released from the restraints of gentility, and getting low, some begin to smoke, while others indulge in a gutter. Muscles and sinews feel equally let loose, and by way of a joke, the cramp ties a double-knot in Clarinda’s calf. ”

“ What a pity it is that so many good things uttered by Poets, and Wits, and Humorists, at chance times—and they are always the best and brightest, like sparks struck out by Pegasus’ own hoof, in a curvet amongst the flints—should be daily and hourly lost to the world for want of a recorder! But in this Century of Inventions, when a self-acting drawing-paper has been discovered for copying visible objects, who knows but that a future Niepce, or Daguerre, or Herschel, or Fox Talbot, may find out some sort of Boswellish writing-paper to repeat whatever it hears! ”

“ Doctor Darby joins company, a tight little body enough, all bobbing up and down with courtesys like the buoy at the Nore, and as oily tongued as any rat in the Greenland Docks. By her own account, she rated a step above Mother to six score of boys, big and little, and every man jack of them more made of, and set store by, than if they had been parts of her own live stock. ”

“ It will maybe turn out quite as deceitful an article as to its other qualities; and in that case, if I had the luck to be a magistrate, I would cold pig the sleeping partners with Cold Bath Fields and send off the active ones, to take a walk at a cart’s tail, with something they could feel, if they could not read it, on their backs and shoulders. That’s how I would measure out the law, if I was Lord Chief Justice. In which sentiments I conclude, with love to yourself, and all my cousins, if I have any living—with my best condolences for my poor late Aunt. ”

“ I CANNOT BEAR A GUN. “Timidity is generally reckoned an essential attribute of the fair sex, and this absurd notion gives rise to more false starts than a race for the Leger. Hence screams at mice, fits at spiders, faces at toads, jumps at lizards, flights from daddy longlegs, panics at wasps, sauve qui peut at sight of a gun. Surely, when the military exercise is made a branch of education at so many ladies’ academies, the use of the musket would only be a judicious step further in the march of mind. ”

“ But perhaps, when they are named to you, your memory may serve to recollect little bone boxes, at sixpence a piece, with a blackamoor’s head atop, and a little bar of philosopher’s steel inside, that points out the north, and sets a needle dancing like mad. It likewise picks up emery, and sticks fast to the blade of a knife. But that is all its powers are competent to—and of course on too small a scale to have any dancing, or lifting, or sticking effect on objects so big as bullocks, or even a pig, or a sheep. ”

“ And a Philosopher he is every inch. He looks, thinks, writes, talks and walks, eats and drinks, and no doubt sleeps philosophically—i.e. deliberately. There is nothing abrupt about his motions,—he goes and comes calmly and quietly—like the phantom in Hamlet, he is here—he is there—he is gone! So it is with his discourse. He speaks slowly, clearly, and with very marked emphasis—the tide of talk flows like Denham’s river, “strong without rage, without overflowing, full.” ”

“ So far—namely, as far as the middle of the Tay—so good; when the spirit of mischief, or curiosity, or humanity, suggested the convenience of a sea-bath, and the refreshment the creature might derive from a taste of its native element. Accordingly, Testudo was lifted over the side, and indulged with a dip and a wallop in the wave, which actually revived it so powerfully, that from a playful flapping with its fore-fins it soon began to struggle most vigorously, like a giant refreshed with brine. ”