Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Robert Prince, Leonard Johnson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. THE POETICAL WORKS OF THOMAS HOOD WITH BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI ENLARGED AND REVISED EDITION A. L. BURT COMPANY, PUBLISHERS, 52-58 DUANE STREET, NEW YORK [Illustration: THOMAS HOOD.] BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. There were scarcely any events in the life of Thomas Hood. One condition there was of too potent determining importance--life-long ill health; and one circumstance of moment--a commercial failure, and consequent expatriation. Beyond this, little presents itself for record in the outward facts of this upright and beneficial career, bright with genius and coruscating with wit, dark with the lengthening and deepening shadow of death. The father of Thomas Hood was engaged in business as a publisher and bookseller in the Poultry, in the city of London,--a member of the firm of Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe. He was a Scotchman, and had come up to the capital early in life, to make his way. His interest in books was not solely confined to their saleable quality. He reprinted various old works with success; published Bloomfield's poems, and dealt handsomely with him; and was himself the author of two novels, which are stated to have had some success in their day. For the sake of the son rather than the father, one would like to see some account, with adequate specimens, of these long-forgotten tales; for the queries which Thomas Hood asks concerning the piteous woman of his _Bridge of Sighs_ interest us all concerning a man of genius, and interest us moreover with regard to the question of intellectual as well as natural affinity:-- "Who was his father, Who was his mother? Had he a sister, Had he a brother?" Another line of work in which the elder Hood is recorded to have been active was the opening of the English book-trade with America. He married a sister of the engraver Mr. Sands, and had by her a large family; two sons and four daughters survived the period of childhood. The elder brother, James, who died early of consumption, drew well, as did also one or two of the sisters. It would seem therefore, when we recall Thomas Hood's aptitudes and frequent miscellaneous practice in the same line, that a certain tendency towards fine art, as well as towards literature, ran in the family. The consumption which killed James appears to have been inherited from his mother; she, and two of her daughters, died of the same disease; and a pulmonary affection of a somewhat different kind became, as we shall see, one of the poet's most inveterate persecutors. The death of the father, which was sudden and unexpected, preceded that of the mother, but not of James, and left the survivors in rather straitened circumstances.