Hood, who lived the greater part of his life in London, wrote most about her. He is London's poet. His best poems are about her, even though they are about her tragedies. A Scotsman by descent, he is yet a true Cockney, laughing most when he is most serious and using his jests like swords.
His description of the adventures of John Higgins (a lesser John Gilpin) at the Easter Monday hunt in Epping Forest; his verses on early closing; on Smithfield Market; on the little chimney sweeps (in which he turned Lamb's "those tender novices, blooming through their first nigritude," into "Day through his Martin 'gan to break, white overcoming jet"); on the old Cockney lady who, after one visit to the country, declares that perhaps she will pay a second "when London is all burnt down "-all these are London poems.
So, too, is "The Song of the Shirt" and above all "The Bridge of Sighs." That was one side of the bridge, but he saw the other also when in that amazing comic fantasy, "The Golden Legend of Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg" he described the Thames on a spring morning:
Gold above and gold below
The earth reflected the golden glow,
From river and hill and valley,
Gilt by the golden light of morn,
The Thames - it looked like the Golden Horn
And the Barge that carried coal or corn
Like Cleopatra's galley!
It is strange how that adjective golden comes and comes again - in Herrick, in Pope, in Hood, and again in that later poet who was not a Londoner, Henley, when he described the Strand on an October afternoon.
It is a strange adjective for this grey city, with her dark river, her sea-fogs and smoke, and weeping winter days. Is it only the transfiguring sunlight, or is there some meaning of their own which the poets have found in the old legend of her golden streets ?