These radical and
circumstantial differences between the men will account for their
different modes in thinking and writing of the poor. But both were men
of genius, of genial humanity, and of singular originality. No one who
reads Crabbe's writings will deny him genius; no one who reads them with
adequate sympathy and attention will deny that his genius is vital with
passion and imagination. Only the latent heat of passion and imagination
could save these seemingly bald and monotonous narratives from being as
dull as a dictionary. But they are not so; they have an interest which
holds the reader with a fixedness of grasp which he cannot loosen.
Crabbe's poetry of the poor is slow and epic; Hood's is rapid
and lyrical. Crabbe's characters are only actual and intensified
individuals; Hood's characters are idealized and representative persons.
Hood gives you only the pathetic or tragical essentials; but, along
with these, Crabbe gives you the complexity and detail of life which
surrounded them. Hood presents you with the picture of a lonely woman at
midnight toiling and starving in the slavery of sewing; but Crabbe would
trace her from her quiet country-home, through the follies which led her
to a London garret. Hood, in his "Lay of the Laborer," makes you listen
to the wail of a strong man imploring leave to toil; Crabbe would find
him drunk in the beer-house or the gin-shop, and then carry you on to
the catastrophe in his ruined home or in his penal death. Hood, in his
"Bridge of Sighs," brings you into the presence of death, and you gaze,
weeping, over the lifeless form of beauty that had once been innocent
and blooming girlhood, but from which the spirit, early soiled and
saddened, took violent flight in its despair; Crabbe would give us the
record of her sins, and connect her end retributively with her
conduct. Much is in Crabbe that is repulsive and austere; but he is,
notwithstanding, an earnest moral teacher and a deep tragic poet. Let
us be content with both Crabbe and Hood: we need to look at the aspect
which each of them gives us of life,--the stern poetry of fact in
Crabbe, and the lyrical poetry of feeling in Hood. Crabbe has dealt with
groups and masses; Hood has immortalized single figures, which, by their
isolation and intensity, take full and forcible possession of the mind,
and can never be driven out from memory.

This is a rather serious conclusion of an article on a comic genius. As
the humorist is f