passive. If languages were learnt as children learn them they would be found easy of acquirement. It is scarcely more difficult to acquire five languages than one, and I have known many instances of five or more languages spoken with equal purity and perfection. The proof of the thorough possession of a language is that you are able to think in it, and that no work of translation goes on in the mind.

He goes on to say that he often dreamed in other languages than English. He was a remarkably interesting character, and his works and recollections are well worth reading. He died in 1872 at the age of eighty, his mental and physical faculties being unimpaired to the last.

THOMAS HOOD.

(1799-1845.)

"THE Serious Poems of Thomas Hood" will give the world a chance to appreciate better his greatness as a poet. Thackeray, as we all remember, expressed in terms that none can forget, his just indignation that this noble poet and loving man should have been compelled to play the mountebank for his living instead of illuminating and educating the world by his genius.

So gladly is the world desirous of being amused rather than instructed and elevated that Hood's serious poems are apt to be passed over when collected in the same volume with his comic writings, and, therefore, it is well to have them in this form.

Who can read the following without sympathy and tears?

We watch'd her breathing through the night,

Her breathing soft and low,

As in her breast the wave of life

Kept heaving to and fro.

So silently we seem'd to speak,
So slowly moved about,

As we had lent her half our powers
To eke her living out.

Our very hopes belied our fears,
Our fears our hopes belied-
We thought her dying when she slept,
And sleeping when she died.

For when the morn came dim and sad,
And chill with early showers,
Her quiet eyelids closed-she had
Another world than ours.

Hood had the power to touch the heart that few but the greatest writers have had, but he also had an unequaled power to make men laugh. He was a consummate poet and a consummate punster, and the latter aspect of his genius was the most encouraged. It paid him better and he was obliged to yield to the popular demand.

" I

"To make laugh is my calling," he said. must jump, I must grin, I must tumble, I must turn language head over heels and leap through grammar.'

When he could have written so much that would have been as enduring as anything in our language he was compelled to play the buffoon. It is a pathetic story in many of its aspects, and yet even Hood's fun is a permanent addition to

our literature. As a comic poet he stands alone. Never was there such brilliancy of wit and humor, and as for his puns, they are unrivaled.

Thomas Hood was born in London in 1799, and when still young lost both his father and mother. He received some education at private schools, and was for a time in a merchant's counting-house. He subsequently was an apprentice to the engraving trade, his mother's brother being an eminent engraver of that period. When he was twenty-two he became assistant editor to the once famous London Magazine, to which Charles Lamb was a contributor, and in which the essays of" Elia" first appeared. Another famous, or rather infamous, contributor to this same periodical was Wainwright, the poisoner, who wrote under the name of James Weathercock. De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium Eater" were first written for the London.

Hood was connected with this magazine for about three years, and his contributions comprise examples of nearly every kind of writing in which he afterward excelled.

Leaving the magazine, he published " Whims and Oddities," and he became also a contributor to the "Annuals," so popular in those days, copies of which are still heirlooms in old families.

"Eugene Aram" was written for one of these. He spent some five years abroad with his family, and "Up the Rhine," one of the most amusing of the books, was produced during that period. On his return to England he was editor for a time of the New Monthly Magazine, and next a periodical of his own, called Hood's Own His gains by literature were always small, and his life was a struggle with poverty and disease. And yet he appears to have accepted his lot with serenity, and his domestic life was certainly a very happy one.

Broken in health, his last days were soothed by the kindness of Sir Robert Peel, who bestowed upon him and his wife a pension of one hundred pounds. He died in 1845.

We are all familiar whith his humorous poems, with "Ben Battle" and "Faithless Sally Brown," with "Miss Kilmansegg" and "The Tale of a Trumpet" and innumerable others, but save two or three, such as "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt," his serious poems are seldom quoted. And yet "The Haunted House," "The Elm Tree," " The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," and "Eugene Aram" are worthy to be ranked with much that is in Keats or Tennyson. The following from his "Ode to the Moon" is classic in its grace and beauty :