rv*';:^-. ' '■: : '■'-':'. J LEIGH HUNT AS POET AjSTD essayist BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO. EDINBURGH AND LONDON • • • • • « • • • • • • • I • • « THE CAVENDISH LIBRARY LEIGH HUNT AS POET AND ESSAYIST BEING THE CHOICEST PASSAGES FROM HIS WORKS SELECTED AND EDITED mitb a :©iograpbical 3-ntroDuction By CHARLES KENT » ' 1 r. « LONDON AND NEW YORK FREDERICK WARNE AND CO. 1889 / should like lo remain visible in this shape. The little of myself that pleases myself I could wish to he accounted worth pleasing others. Lt:iGH Hunt, On Books. • • • • I • • • • CONTENTS. ^52 Biographical Introduction LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. The Story of Rimini . The Feast of the Poets The Song of Ceres The Grasshopper and the Cricket To John Hunt, ^Etat. Four Thoughts on the Avon To Thornton Hunt, ^Etat. Six . - Quiet Evenings .... On a Lock of Milton". s Hair The Panther .... Hero and Leander Martial's Epitaph on Erotion Coronation Soliloquy of George the Fourth To a Spider running across a Room Mahmoud ..... On Reading Pomfret's "Choice"' Sudden Fine Weather Song of Faries Robbing an Orchard Paganini ..... Captain Sword and Ca^jtuia Pen The Glove and the Lions . Songs of the Flowers The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit Our Cottage .... Christmas ..... Bodryddau ..... A Hymn to Bishop Valentine Rondeau ..... To the Queen .... To the Infant Princess Royal . Confronting Foes Magic Influence of Music . Three Visions .... r.VGK ix 3 lo 1 1 13 14 16 17 19 19 20 21 23 24 28 28 30 32 34 34 1>1 39 41 43 45 46 49 50 52 52 54 56 57 5« M CONTENTS. Old Keiisiiigtun Palace I^ifling Pillion "Wealth and "Womanhood . Albums .... General Song of the FIower.s A Heaven upon Earth The Lover of Music to his Pianoforte Eeflections of a Dead Body Cupid Swallowed Catullus's Return Home to Sirmio An Angel in the Hou.se Abou Ben Adhem Jafltar .... The Bitter Gourd The Language of Flowers To May To June Dirge for an Infant The Royal Line . To Charles Dickens . LEIGH HUNT'S ESSAYS A Dav 1)T the Fire The Old Lady . J^ Pleasant Recollections To any one whom Bad Weather Depresses On the Household Gods of the Ancients Social Genealogy Angling Ludicrous Exaggeration Total Mistake of Nervous Disorders for Insanit Mists and Fogs . Far Countries A Tale for a Chimney Corner Thieves, Ancient and Modern X A Few Thoughts on Sleep . The Fair Revenge Spirit of the Ancient Mytholog; Getting up on Cold Mornings The Old Gentleman . Hats, New and Ancient Seamen on Shore X On the Realities of Imagination Hoole and Fairfax's Tasso Deaths of Little Children . •< Poetical Anomalies of Shape Daisies Mavdaj^ Of Sticks . Of the Sight of Shops A Rainy Day CONTENTS. A " Now" — descriptive of a Hot Day Shaking- Hands .... On receiving a Sprig of Laurel from Vauclu.<-c Coaches and their Horses . Thoughts and Guesses on Human Nat On Commendatory Verses . Upon Indexes .... •\ Of Dreams ..... A Human Animal and the other Extreme On the Talking of Nonsense The Sacred Corner of Pisa Genoa the SujDerb The Glory of Colour in Italy The Giuli Tre .... My Books Spring ..... On seeing a Pigeon make Love . ^Fiction and matter of fact Ver-Vert — the Parrot of the Nuns An Evening with Pope ^ Criticism on Female Beauty Conversation of Swift A Man introduced to his Ancestors A Novel Party .... Pantomimes .... Bad Weather .... Fine Days in January and February Walks Home by Night Secret of some Existing Fashions Dancing in General . On the Graces and Anxieties of Pig Driving An Earth upon Heaven Specimens of British Poetesses Tea-Drinking .... Windows ..... The Cat by the Fire . A " Now " — descriptive of a Cold Da'' The Architect of St. Paul's Portraits in Stationers' Hall Heralds' College Richard Lovelace Samuel Richardson Wayfarers in Chancery Lane The Pianoforte The Waiter .... Bricks and Bricklayers Colour Visit to the Zoological Gardens Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ■ . Bookstalls ..... Marriages from the Stage . On deceased Statesmen who have written verses VI I FAGK 222 230 241 243 249 255 260 264 26S 266 270 273 274 279 283 293 293 304 306 309 313 316 319 321 324 326 --^ ^ -> 336 338 360 362 364 366 369 370 370 371 372 374 375 379 381 383 385 390 393 394 398 Vlll CONTENTS. Bookbinding and Heliodonis On the Eare Vice called Lying Cowley and Thomson Pope's tSurroundings . Physicians and Love Letters (Social Morality . Anacreon .... George Colman the Elder . George Colman the Younger Samviel Pepys Madame de Sevigne . ^ A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla George Selwyn . --^Imagination and Fancy Spenser .... Chaucer .... Marlowe .... Shakspeare .... Milton .... Coleridge .... Shelley .... Keats ..... Table-Talk .... Listen .... Wild Fower;^', Furze, and Wimbledon Eclipses, Human Beings, and the Lower Creation Malice of Fortune The Monthly Nurse . The Conductor . ,^ Wit and Humour The Inside of an Omnibus Overrun by a Flock of Sheep The Last Victim of a Hoax Beds and Bedrooms . The World of Books . Bagpipes .... The Countenance after Death Gibbon .... Worlds of Different People Russian Horn Band . Weeping .... Cheerfulness in English Literature Leontius Bibliography .... 402 405 406 410 413 419 425 426 429 432 440 450 460 464 464 467 469 470 472 474 476 478 481 481 482 483 484 484 488 491 502 508 510 510 516 221 521 521 522 522 523 524 524 527 A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. Leigh Hunt is so deliglitful a ^vritev, both in prose and verse, and liis good things have, until now, lain scattered broadcast through so many volumes, numbering in all at a moderate computation at least eighty, most of which are long since entirely out of print, that it appears almost incredible that more than a hundred years should have elapsed since his birth without his choicest productions as Poet and Essayist having' been, hitherto, brought together in a single volume. It is this thouglit which has naturally led at last to the issuing from the press of the present col- lection. It endows its possessor, at once, accoi-ding to Marlowe's familiar phrase, with — Infinite riches in a little room. It embraces within it, to begin v/itli, many well-known masterpieces. As a companion it can always be relied upon to charm and to exhilarate. And its influence, like that of its author throughout his literaiy career, will invariably be found by the reader, as he turns these leaves, aboiit the brightest and pleasantest ^vell imaginable. Within this narrow compass have been brought together the spright- liest runnings from his pen, selected from all his vai'ied and voluminous periodicals, — from the JVews, the Examiner , the Reflector, the Jioimd Table, the Indicator, the Liberal, the Comjyanioji, the C/iaf of the Week, the Tatler, Leigh Jfitnfs London Journal, Ljeigh Hitnt's Journal, and the Monthly Repository. Together with the choicest passages thus taken from his own serial publications, selections X A UIOGKAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. luive here been made also from among his contributions to many other contemporary organs of public opinion, — .such as Fraser^s 2Iagazine, AinsicortN s Magazine, Tail's JIagazlne, the JS^eiv Monthly Magazine, the Atlas, the Traveller, the True Sun, the Morning Chronicle, the Musical Times, the Westminster Review, the Edinburgh Review, and the Monthly Chronicle. What is especially noticeable in regard to the writings of Leigh Hunt is the fact that they were penned almost with- out any premeditation whatever. They were produced, so to speak, from hand to mouth, on the emergency of the moment, in obedience to the clamorous necessity of the occasion. Whenever he wrote, it was always at a drive, and currente calarno. Even when he sat down to indite a three volume novel, he had, in submission to the imperious demand of the hour, to supply his publisher w^ith chapter after chapter at rapid intervals so as to secure for his home needs the advantage of a weekly payment. One of his ^periodicals, and that a daily one, the Tatler, so long as his health enabled him to do so, he wrote entirely himself, with- out any extraneous assistance whatever. In putting this fact upon record, he adds, not very surprisingly, that the labour of its continuous production almost killed him. Beginning the brain-work of his life, as he did, besides, when he w\ns a mere stripling, he had to persist in it strenuously almost to the very last. Bearing this in mind, it hardly seems matter for amazement to find him stating frankly in his Autobiography, that the staple productions of his hand as an author, his prose writings, Vv'ere called into existence always under more or less excite- ment, his face becoming flushed as he wrote, and his whole nervous system visibly agitated. In startling contrast to this, he takes note, there, of the calming influence upon him of metrical composition, verse, as he says, having been in- variably written by him with the utmost composure. His rhythmical effusions, indeed, sweetened for him the whole current of his existence. A LIOGlUPHiCAL IX'i'KODLC'JlUX. xi What appears, now, in llie retrosipcct, all Ijut incom- prehensible in his regard, is the circimistance that, at tlio outset oi his career, Leigli Hunt was for several years together in the early part of this century assailed by more than one of the leading organs of public opinion with a scurrility that was often nothing less than ferocious and malignant. It arose clearly from the completest misap- prehension, by his vilitiers, alike of his writings and of his character. His writings, both prose and verse, remain to this day intact — unaltered and unmodified. Nothing in them having been cancelled or withdrawn, they can speak for themselves. His character, again, such as it was then, continued, in all essentials, identically the same to the very end — ripened, it ma}^ be, with the mere lapse of years, but otherwise unchanged. Other poets of that peiiod, with whom fj-om the first his name was intimately associated, and whose writings are now among the glories of our literature, were no doubt by those same critics alternately derided and reviled. But Leigh Hunt, being in point of time their immediate pre- cursor, was the chosen and central target upon which were concentrated by that select band of reviewers their fiercest and most unmeasured vituperations. He was held mainly responsible by them as the originator and leader of what was scornfully dubbed the Cockney School of Poetry. Keats, it is almost ridiculous now to recall to mind, was contemptuously spoken of by them as an insignificant disciple of his, whom he was vainly striving to lift into notoriety. All through that distressing interval, during which Leigh Hunt had to bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, he not only held on his course with the most perfect equanimity, but exercised a truly remarkable influence over some^f the most illustrious of his contemporaries. Byron, when they eventually met, told him that it was the sight of his earliest volume at Harrow that had been one of his own first incentives to write verses — five years prior, that is, to the publication of the " Hours of Idleness." Keats Sii A BIOGllAPHICAL IKTRODtlCTlON. paid him the signal tribute of dedicating to him his first volume of poetry, and the yet mere signal tribute of imitat- ing him in his lust volume, meanhig '• Lamia." Shelley, besides laying claim to him as his dearest friend, offered him the homage of echoing in " Julian and Mandalo " the fluent and refined yet often masculine versification in which he had sung of the fateful loves of Paulo and Francesca. While, later on, John Forster gratefully acknowledged that, at the outset of his career as a student, he was mainly indebted to Leigh Hunt for his strong predilection for, and final adoption of, literature as his profession. Who and what, then, after all, was this long-reviled, gentle, kindly, gifted creature when his character came to be really known, and his writings, whether in prose or verse, dispassionately examined, by men peculiarly well qualified to judge as to the merits and demerits of himself and his books 1 What, for example, was the deliberate utterance in his regard of the usually atrabilious, cynical, captious, dyspeptic Carlyle ? It was this, that Leigh Hunt, in his estimation, was — " A man of genius in a very strict sense of that word ; of brilliant, varied gifts ; of graceful fertility ; of clearness, lovingness, truthfulness; of childlike open character, also of most pure and even exemplary private deportment ; a man who can be other than loved only by those who have not seen him, or seen him from a distance through a false medium." Charles Dickens, again, has no less emphatically pronounced Leigh Hunt to have been — '• A man who in the midst of the sorest temptations main- tained his honesty unblemished by a single stain — who in all public and private transactions was the very soul of truth and honour — who never bartered his opinion or betrayed his friend." Any one who could have been so lovingly regarded and so earnestly spoken of by men of such sterling qualities, and of such searchingly keen intelligence as Dickens and Carlyle, could only have been systematically assailed by means of a series of monstrous libels and mis- representations. It is inconceivable — he paid himself long A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xiii afterwards — to wliat extent he suffered in mind, body, and estate in consequence. Further on in liis life, however, there came to him, in compensation for all this, what James Hannay aptly termed "an Indian summer of fame," when he himself could exultingly remark, *' It is not possible for many persons to have greater friends than I have ;" and could even add what may have been in his own experience almost still sweeter, '"' I am not aware that I have now a single enemy." If the goal he was then approaching was an Old Age in Europe, it was also just as distinctly what is termed a Euthanasia. James Henry Leigh Hunt, whose parents w^ere both of Transatlantic origin, was born, on the 19th October, 1784, about eight miles north of Tjondon, at the pretty little rustic village of Southgate, in Middlesex. His father, Isaac Hunt, who was a native of Barbados, was the son, grandson, and great-grandson of a succession of clergymen of the Eng- lish Church in that colony. According to a family tradition, they were descended from a race of Tory Cavaliers, one of whom, at about the middle of the seventeenth century, had fled from Devonshire to the West Indies to escape from the ascendancy of Cromwell, and, on i-eaching his destination, had taken his place at once among the earliest English settlers in the island of Barbados. Isaac Hunt, having been sent thence, in his boyhood, for his education to Philadelphia, had completed his academical course by taking his degree, both in that city and at New York, as a INIaster of Arts. Immediately after this he decided upon settling down permanently at Philadelphia, where he married Mary 81iewell, the daughter of a flourishing merchant of that place ; and, though originally set apart for the Church by his father, finally resolved himself upon adopting the law as his profes- sion. His practice — according to the American system, about equally that of attorney and barrister — was as rapidly increasing upon his hands, as his family was upon those of his wife, when their domestic fortunes v.^ere completely xiv A BIOGEAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. transformed by the abrupt outbreak of the Revolution. So pronounced in its earlier stages was his general bearing as a loyalist, that, to escape the popular fury, or in other words the imminent risk of being tarred and feathered, he had no choice but hurriedly to take flight from Philadelphia. This was accomplished so precipitately that he had to. go alone to England, leaving his wife and children to follow him thither at the first available opportunity. Pending their arrival in his wake, in the old, ancestral mother-country, the ex-lawyer from Philadelphia had to open for himself a new path in life by tardily carrying out, as through an after- thought, his father's earliest in tention in his regard. Though his religious views Avere from first to last of rather dubious orthodoxy, he readily made up his mind at this sudden turning-point in his career to become a clergyman of the Church of England. Shortly after this decision was arrived at, he was duly ordained by Lowth, the then Bishop of London. His reputation, thereupon, soon became remark- able as that of a fashionable preacher. When his young family and their mother at length re- joined him in England, they found him ofiiciating in this capacity at Bentinck Chapel in Lisson Grove. His home, then temporarily established in Newman Street, Oxford Street, was soon afterwards removed to Hampstead Square, and the scene of his labours as a pulpit orator from Padding- ton to Southgate. There, near Southgate, was a seat of the Duke of Chandos, the then Master of the Horse, who, being numbered amongst his congregation, was, needless to say, the most influential of them all. And there, under his Grace's favour, the genial and scholarly parson was appointed, and for several years remained, tutor to the Duke's ne]3hevv', Mr. Leigh. It is curious to bear in mind for a moment, in association with both Master and Pupil, that, thanks to the genius of the E-ev. Isaac's youngest son, who was born to him there in Southgate, their united names are still to this day held in remembrance. Under the patronage of so powerful a nobleman as the A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xv Duke of Chandos, there appeared for a time to the popular preacher liimself every fair prospect of his winning his way sooner or hxter to almost any preferment. His aspirations led him, in the vague future, to cherish, even, the day- dream of a bishopric. His vivacious and convivial tempera- ment, if nothing else, would nevertheless have effectually barred for him the path towards the development of any such ambition. His outspeaking disdain of anything like tact, too, would of itself have constituted an impassable barrier : as illustrated one day, in the midst of an altercation with one of the bishops, by his reply to the inquiry " Do you know ^svho I am ? " — " Yes, my lord," (with a bow) " dust and ashes." Apart from all this, his religious opinions were so little to be counted upon as in any way orthodox that his Anglicanism, after lapsing for a time into Uni- tarianism, led him at length to that absolute Universalism which believes that the devils themselves in the end will be brought to a state of bliss. To complete all the ob.staeles of his own creation thus perversely raised before him and his on the road to good Fortune, his Bohemian tastes and his unlucky persistence in perpetually falling into debt, brought him at last to that constantly recurring oscillation upon the verge of ruin which is the cruellest of all the many cruel phases in which the poverty of a home can be realized. Recalling this period to mind in his Autobiography, Leigh Hunt vividly enough describes by a single touch how the family struggled on '•' between placid readings and frightful knocks at the door." His earliest recollection of a room, ho further says, w^as of one in the King's Bench where his father was a prisoner. All the good that could be secured to him by his friends by way of solace for his misfortunes was by get'ting his name enrolled on the Civil List for a Loyalist pension of ;^ioo a year. One by one, his three eldest sons, somehow, while they were yet striplings, got into employment, — Stephen as a lawyer's clerk, Robert as an engraver, John by being apprenticed to Reynell the printer. As for the xvi A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. youngest of them all, Leigh Hunt, shortly after whose birth at Southgate their little home had been moved to Finchley, he was the especial pet of every one under its roof- beams; and, even as a mere child, was clearly the most introspective and thoughtful member of the whole house- hold. While yet in his infancy he gave in his adhesion to Universalism, out of the very revulsion of feeling inspired by the alarming reflection that occurred to him one day when on his knees repeating the Litany — " Suppose Eternal Puinishment should be true ! " Equally characteristic of him at that same tender age is the incident of his having been led one day, out of the very horror inspired by the most trivial oath (perhaps, as he conjectured, out of the very excess of it) to snatch a " fearful joy " by its utterance, when such was the remorse he experienced that for a long while afterwards he could not receive a bit of praise, or a pat of encouragement on the head, without thinking to himself, " Ah ! they little suspect I am the boy who said, 'd — nit.'" In 1792, being then seven, he donned the red leather belt, the yellow tunic and stockings, and the blue gown of a student of Christ's Hospital — entering that institution just after C*harles Lamb and Coleridge had quitted it. His Masters and 8choolfellows, as he recalls them to mind, live again in his Recollections. There is Salt, the morning- reader, who spoke in his throat with a sound as of weak- ness and corpulence, and who was famous among them for saying " murracles " instead of miracles ! There is Field, the under grammar- master, who was so good-natured that when he feebly hit one of the boys with a cane he would make a face as if he were taking physic ; and who was so absent- minded and at the same time so deaf that, if a boy, instead of asking his permission to go and see a friend then in w^ait- ing, put to him some preposterous question entirely wide of the mark, such as, " Are you not a great fool, sir 1 " or ^' Isn't your daughter a pretty girl ? " would answer quite innocently, "Yes, child! " Then^ again, there is the waggish Junior A BIOGEAPHICAL IXTRODUCtlON. xvii Pupil wlio^ under punishment, used to ** snatch his jokes out of the very flame and fury of the Master, like >Snapdragon ! " And Le Clrice^ one of the Head boys, who whimsically excused himself for not having done a particular exercise by saying that he had had a " lethargy," and who, by the very impudence of his plea, escaped even a word of reproof ! And another, Allen, the handsome Grecian, who so captivated every one who came near him that, blundering one day in the street against an apple-woman, and turning round to appease her in the midst of her revilings, he had yelled after him, '' Where are you driving to, you great hulking, good- for-nothing — beautiful fellow, God bless you ! " Each in turn, after the lapse of years, is photographed to the life in the camera of Leigh Hunt's Autobiography. As for himself, sensitive and delicate though he was during the earlier part of the seven years he remained at the Bluecoat School, he must, even then, as these sketches indicate, have been keenly observant. AVhat he w^as like at that period is realized for us upon the instant by the excla- mation of the fat and comely under grammar -master, Stevens — " whom you loved as you looked at," says Hunt, " and seemed as if you must love the more the fatter he became : " whose genial greeting, whenever the boy made his appearance, was, '• Here comes our little black-haired friend who stammers so. Let us see w^hat we can do for him." The impediment in his speech here referred to, unhke that of Charles Lamb, happily proved, as years ran on, to be only temporary. His jet-black hair and dark eyes he inhei'ited from his mother, as he did also, as was sliow*n from his earliest boyhood, '' her two accomplishments " — a love of nature and a love of books. The classics, curiously enough, he recoiled from — all except a single episode in Virgil. He took to his heart, however, three works the contents of which he devoured at every opportunity — these being Lempriere's Dictionary, Tooke's Pantheon, and Spence's Polymetis, the great folio edition with plates. To these b Xviii A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. three books, indeed, and to Cooke's darling little duodecimo edition of the English Poets — which was just then, provi- dentially for him, coming out in sixpenny numbers^ and which instalments he bought over and over again, fresh sets of them in his hands, as he records, ''' disappearing like but- tered crumpets " — Leigh Hunt may be said to have owed, in truth, the chief part of his education. Very soon, as was but natural, he began to emulate these chosen instructors by writing verses himself — his first poem being in honour of the Duke of York's '' Victory at Dunkirk," which said Victory (only, however, after the poem was completed) turned out, greatly to his mortification, to be a Defeat. His ambition rising, he wrote a poem of larger dimensions, called "Winter" in emulation of Thomson, and another of yet greater elaboration, called " The Fairy King " in emulation of Spenser. What is especially remarkable, however, in regard to one who was afterwards to become so delightful an essayist, is the fact that he could make nothing of his schoolboy attempts to imitate the S2:)ectator, his master, Boyer, crump- ling up his themes and tossing them away with the utmost contempt. Prose composition, in the production' of which he was so soon afterwards to show such extraordinary facility and vivacity, appeared indeed, at the outset, for him, to have been hedged round with insuperable difficulties. In 1799, being then fifteen, Leigh Hunt reluctantly — with tears even, to the surprise of both masters and schoolmates — took his departure from Christ's Hospital. For some little time after this his life was very desultory. He haunted the bookstalls. He took his place for a while in the law office of his brother Stephen. He continued persistently and most industriously to write verses. A collection of these, written between the ages of twelve and sixteen, was inconsiderately put together by his father and precipitately published, in 1801, under the title of '' Juvenilia," with a portrait of the boy-author, by Jackson, prefixed to it as a frontispiece. It had a success, too, that might have proved A BlOGllAPHICxVL INTllODUCTION. xi.^i clisjistrous. It ran through two editions within the twelve- month, a third making its appearance early in 1802. "I was as proud, perhaps, of the book at that time," wrote Leigh Hunt when he had grown grey and had become famous, " as I am ashamed of it now." Before reputation of any kind could be won, however, he had to serve a long appren- ticeship both to the periodicals and the booksellers. His first venture in journalism was his contributing, in 1804, a series of papers called ''The Traveller" to the evening journal of that name afterwards incorporated with the Globe. '' Mr. Town, Junior, Critic and Censor- General," was the signature he appended to these essays, all but the Junior being borrowed from the Elder Colman's " Connoisseur." Then, too — so far at least as the production of the manuscript was concerned — he wrote a couple of Farces, a Comedy, and a Tragedy. In 1805 he supplied The Xeii:s,ii journal that year started by his brother John, with a succession of animated and thoroughly independent '' Theatrical Criticisms," a selection from which was after- wards published under the title of '* Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres." Besides writing, in 1S06, in The Month! y Repository of Theology and General Literature, he contributed five introductory biographical papers, three of them having relation to Yoltaire, Johnson, and Goldsmith, to ''' Classic Tales," which as a collection was completed in 1807 in five volumes. Early in the following year, on the 8th January, 1808, appeared the first number of The JExaminer, of which his brother John was the proprietor, and of which he himself, being then just twenty three years of age, under- took the editorship. Shortly before this, and for a little while afterwards, he held the position of clerk in the War Office, to which he had been inducted through the influence of his father's friend, the then Premier, Mr. Addington, afterwards Lord Sidmouth, but who had ceased to be Prime Minister, as it happened, before The Examiner actually came into existence. The XX A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. motto of that journal, which was pronouncedly Liberal and of no political party whatever, was from Swift — ''Party is the madness of many and the gain of a few." Por fourteen years together Leigh Hunt conducted it, not merely as a critical but as a political organ, with the utmost boldness and independence. This is all the more noteworthy, seeing that he was himself in no way a politician. On his bookshelves you would have looked in vain for a single political text-book, like " The "Wealth of Nations." They were abundantly laden instead with Spensers and Arabian Nights. The literary, artistic, and theatrical notabilities with whom he was then brought into contact, he depicts, often to the very life in retrospect, by an apt phrase or two of extraordinary vividness. Campbell, who gave him the idea of a French Yirgil, he found to be as handsome as the Abbe Delille is said to have been ugly. Fuseli's dominant colouring, he realizes to us upon the instant as ''a sort of livid green, like brass diseased." The incongruous bust of Liston the comedian, he shapes out for us by no more than a touch or two of his pen — the mouth and chin, with the throat under it hanging " like an old bag," but the upper part of the head being as fine as possible. In the second year of The, Examiner^ Leigh Hunt married Marianne, the daughter of Thomas and Ann Kent. In that same year, 1809, he first saw one who afterwards came to be the dearest of his friends, Shelley. In 18 10 he edited a new quarterly called The Reflector, which was another literary venture started by his brother John, but one that extended only to four numbers. In its final instalment appeared the earliest and perhaps the most characteristic of those colloquial essays in the writing of which he may be said to stand alone. It takes its place there- fore by right in the present collection (pages 81-96) as the initial specimen of his most charming manner as an Essayist. At the very time, however, when he was chatting thus delightfully wiih his reader " By the Fire " in The Rejlector, A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xxi he was, by his vigorous and uncompromising denunciation of the Prince Regent in the columns of The Examiner , calling down upon himself and his brother the penalties of a State prosecution. More than once previously that journal had been arraigned (to no purpose, as it happened), as an assailant of the powers that be, at the bar of public opinion. But its oflence was now too heinous to admit of its any longer evading condign punishment. An adulator of the Kegent had but just then fawned upon him in print ill so many words as an " Adonis in loveliness." Where- upon Leigh Hunt, revolted by such nauseating sycophancy, and unable to suppress his sense of the ridiculous, had ironically recalled to public recollection the fact that "This Adonis of loveliness, was a corpulent man of fifty." So poignant was the sting of this ijersijiage, that, as the result of the Trial, which took place on December 9, 18 12, in the Court of King's Bench, at Westminster, before Lord Ellenborough, " The Prince of Wales v. The Examiner," John and Leigh Hunt were condemned to pay into Court, each of them, a fine of ;i^5oo, and to undergo, apart from one another, in fact in separate goals, two years imprison, ment. Horsemonger Lane Gaol, during the whole of that time, was the scene of Leigh Hunt's incarceration. Enter- ing it on the 3rd February 181 3, he quitted it only, as it were, when the last grain of sand, at the last turn of the hour-glass, had run out, at the close of the appointed interval, on the 3id February 181 5. Beyond the cruel gap thus made in the lives of himself and his brother, by their isolation for so long a period within the walls of a prison, they found themselves mulcted, when the penalty inflicted upon them had been paid to the last farthing, not to the tune of merely ;3^5oo apiece, but, when all was said and done, of fully two thousand pounds sterling. Putting a cheerful face upon the matter from the very outset; however, in obedience to the dictates of his own blithe philosophy, Leigh Hunt made a sunshine in that shady place by turning the room allotted to him, one of the ample xxLi A BIOGRAPHICAL INmODUOTION. wards of the infirmary, into a very bower of contentment. He papered its walls with a trellis of roses. He had its ceiling coloured with the semblance of clouds floating in a blue sky. Its barred windows were hidden from view by Venetian blinds. Bookcases were set up surmounted with busts. Flowers, either in bouquets, or, better still, growing in pots, were disposed about the apartment. A pianoforte, by bringing a look of home to it, and infusing a very soul of music into it all, gave the finishing touch to his arrange- ments. His delight was, whenever a stranger crossed his threshold, to note his stare of amazement at such unex- pected surroundings. Charles Lamb protested that there was no room at all like it anywhere, except in a fairy tale. A garden to match, in the little gaol-yard just outside this halcyon chamber, was sedulously cultivated by the sybarite prisoner, who, to screen from sight its sordid sur- roundings, enclosed it with green trellis-work, and adorning its centre with a grass-plot, prided himself upon getting a pud- dmg, in his second year, out of his apple-tree, and upon hear- ing one of his visitors (Tom Moore) declare that he had seen nowhere such heartsease. Upon one of the bookshelves in his house-room, besides, as a very talisman of delight to himself, Leigh Hunt had, at the beginning of his time of durance, placed with loving hands what was for him, as he declared, *' truly a lump of sunshine," the fifty-six duodecimo volumes of the'Tarnasso Italiano" with vignettes, which he had picked up for thirty pounds, and always regarded as a bargain, it having throughout his life repaid him a million times over in the happiness he derived from it. Meantime all through the period of his incarceration a world of sympathy from outsiders poured in upon the com- pulsory recluse. Jeremy Bentham, venerable in age but with the simplicity of a child, took part with him, there, in a game of battledore and shuttlecock. Lord Byron, know- ing he was engaged at the time upon a Dante-esque poem, brought to him under his arm a couple of quarto volumes, with a view to aid him in his writing by the supply of autho- A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xxiii rities. Charles and Mary Lamb comforted him with their visits in all weathers. Moore, Hazlitt, Shelley, Broug-ham, and a throng of other notabilities, brightened his solitude. A new gladness of a tenderer kind was brought to him by the birth, within the walls of the prison, of his eldest daughter, Mary Florimel, of whom he pathetically remarks after her death, "she was beautiful, and, for the greatest part of an existence of thirty years, she was happy." When the time for Leigh Hunt's release had arrived, an illness of long standing, which had needed very diflferent treatment, had been so burnt in upon him " by the iron that enters into the soul of the ca^Dtive/' that, once again at large, his health recovered but very slowly. Because his brother's house was in its immediate neigh- bourhood, he took up his residence, on regaining his liberty, in the Edgware Road. At their first meeting, as he records, with an evident pang in the mere retrospect, their faces were wet with the tears of manhood. His exquisite appre- ciation of the ridiculous, however, even at that depressing epoch in his career, seems to have come almost immediately afterwards to his assistance. For, the absurdities of the dig- nified ]3ersonage who was then his landlord, must of themselves have proved a distinct restorative. Thus, at one moment, he would direct his lodger's attention to an exceedingly wealthy old gentleman who lived next door and was getting into his carriage, adding in a tone amounting to the awful, " He is the greatest plumber in London." And at another, with a manifestly splendid turn for anti-climax, he would call from his parlour window to one of his children, " You, sir, there — Maximilian — come out of the gutter." Or, with an air of good-natured domineering^ he would be heard bawling to his wife as he left the house, " D — n it, my love, I insist on having the pudding." To the dwelling presided over by this Micawber-like lodging-house keeper, Lord Byron, then, as Leigh Hunt long afterwards recalled to mind, looking at his very handsomest, frequently went, out of his eagerness to cheer up by his companionship the valetudinaiian friend xxiv A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. who, when apparently at the last gasp, had but just won his way back to freedom. Already, when the second year of his imprisonment was approaching, Leigh Hunt had issued from the press, as a substantive reprint from The Reflector, his maiden poem, a jeu cV esprit suggested by " The Session of the Poets " of Sir John Suckling. It was entitled " The Feast of the Poets," and, though obviously a mere ^:>{ece d'occasion, and as light and frothy as a whipped syllabub, was so vivacious that it ran into a second edition in the year. Then, too, in 1815, he published "The Descent of Liberty : a Masque," in cele- bration of the fall of Napoleon, which he inscribed to his old schoolfellow at Christ's Hospital, with whom he had learnt Italian, Thomas Barnes, who two years afterwards became the editor of 27ie Times. All through the period when Leigh Hunt was under lock and key in the Surrey gaol, it should be borne in mind that he had persevered in his editorial labours on The Examiner. As a welcome relaxa- tion in the midst of his political and critical drudgery upon that journal, he had, soon after his release, brought to a completion the poem, begun prior to his conviction, continued at intervals during his continement, and at length, in the spring of 18 16, published soon after he had made for him- self a new home in the Vale of Health at Hampstead. This was " The Story of PJmini," which he inscribed to Lord Byron, and by the instant success and undoubted in- fluence of which upon contemporary poets as illustrious as Keats and Shelley, he may very confidently be said to have made his most enduring mark upon English literature. With Keats, at this happy period of their lifetime, Hunt was lihen first brought, to the delight of both, into personal com- munication. How the younger poet rejoiced in the unlooked- for pleasure awakened in his heart by their intimate com- munings, he clearly enough indicated by the exquisite sonnet addressed to his new friend shortly after they had been thus brought together ; the one beginning with the lament that — • Glory and loveliness have passed away ; A BIOCtIJAPHICAL introduction. XXV aiid ending — Ijut there arc left cleliglits as high as these, And I shall ever bless my destiny That in a time when under pleasant trees Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free, A leafy luxury, seeing I could please With these poor offerings, a man like thee. The ''Julian and Mandalo" of Slielley, on the other hand, showed at once in a very signal manner how great had been the eftect upon him of Leigh Hunt's exultant revival, or readaptation, in "The Story of Rimini," of the resonant versification of Chaucer, and the ringing triplets of Dry den. In collaboration with Plazlitt, he, in 1817, brought out in two volumes a collection of Essays on Literature, Men, and Manners, which the joint authors entitled The Round Table. To this Leigli Hunt contributed twelve, some of whicli, however, were merely reprints from The lieflector. In 18 1 8 he issued from the press, under the title of " Foliage," what he afterwards referred to, with an evident sense of regret, as " a hasty set of miscellaneous poems," both original and translated. Those which were original, he headed " Greenwoods ; " and — more appropriately — • those which were translations from the poets of antiquity, '' Evergreens." Meanwhile, through The Examiner, he was availing himself of every discoverable opportunity to spread the fame of his more cherished friends and inti- mates. Through its columns both Keats and Shelley were first brought to the knowledge of the outer world. There, too, Charles Lamb gave brilliant evidence of his peerless skill in poetic, and especially in dramatic, criticism. There, moreover, in The Examiner, it is worth mentioning that O'Connell produced one of the very earliest of his thence- forth famous addresses. Another periodical publication of Hunt's, called TJte Literary Pocket-Book, appeared in 18 19, as well as in 1820, after which it was discontinued. It contained, among other dainty contributions from his hand. xxvi A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. a Calendar descriptive of the successive beauties of the year, afterwards, in 182 1, republished in a collected form, as '' Tlie Months." In 1819, again, he issued from the press two poems upon classic themes, one of them relating to " Hero and Leander," and the other to " Bacchus and Ariadne;" while, in 1820, he reproduced from Tasso, " Amyntas, a Tale of the Woods," which he inscribed to Keats. AVhat is of far greater interest to note, however, in his regard, at this period of his literary career, as marking more particularly its laborious development, is the fact that, between the 3rd October 1819 and the 21st March 1 82 1, he brought out, from week to week, in sixty-six numbers, one of the most racy and delectable of all his periodicals — The Indicator. In it, just as the humour of the moment prompted him to his choice of a theme, he discoursed, always deliciously, upon topics the most varied and wildly incongruous in the wide universe of things — upon Sticks, Hats, Thieves, Shops, Books, Dreams, Coaches. It was in recognition of his exceptional success in this new character that Chax'les Lamb apostrophized him in the couplet- Wit-., poet, prose-man, party-man, translator, Hunt, thy best title yet is " Indicator." It is interesting to bear in recollection the fact in regard to these essays that, among many of the more notable men who were contemporaries when, from week to week, they made their first appearance, each had his special favourite. Thus, Shelley took by preference to " The Fair Bevenge," Lord Holland to those on the " Old Lady " and the ^' Old Gentleman," Hazlitt to the one on "Sleep," Lamb to the " Deaths of Little Children," Keats to a " ' Now'— descriptive of a Hot Day " — the last mentioned, not impos- sibly, because he happened to be living with Leigh Hunt at 13 Mortimer Terrace, Kentish Town, at the very time when it was being written; and because he had himself, A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xxvii ia fact, contributed one or two hints towards the more vivid reaHzation of the picture therein described. During the year in which Leigh Hunt had brought his delightful but almost killing work on TJie Indicator to a conclusion, he contributed four articles to The Examiner ui)on as many popular poets then living — one of them now almost forgotten, certainly never read — to wit, the Sonneteer Bowles ; and the other three being Byron, Campbell, and Coleridge. For some time past the hitherto well-sustained prosperity of that journal had been sensibly declining, borne down, on the one hand, as Hunt himself conjectured, by the long-continued ascendancy of the Tories, and on the other by the all but abandonment by the Whigs of the Reform Movement. Under these depressing circumstances, with his delicate frame worn down by his anxious and ex- haustive labours, it is small matter for surprise that his health at this juncture failed him completely. . Acting in obedience to the earnest advice of his friends, and heartened to so bold a movement by the direct in- vitation of the dearest of them all, Shelley, he embarked for Italy on the 15th of November 182 1, in search of better fortunes and a brighter climate, takino- with him on this (for him) hazardous enterprise his sick wife and their whole brood of children. Although they dropped down the river no later than the next morning, the weather was so adverse to them when once they were in the Channel, that not until the 22nd December had they reached Plymouth, where, having landed, they decided upon putting off the continuance of their voyage to the following spring. There, at Plymouth, Leigh Hunt's journalistic re23ute was so far appreciated by the Devonshire Liberals, that to his pleasur- able embarrassment, he, " the privatest of all public men," as he says, found himself complimented, face to face with his readers, by the presentation of a silver cup by way of testimonial. Having re-embarked at Plymouth on the 13th May 1822, it was not until the very close of June that they contrived to reach Leghorn, So long had been xxviii A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. their journey that it was only to be compared, as Peacock said, to one of the voyagings of Ulysses. What was designed in connection with this rather venturesome migra- tion of Leigh Hunt and his family to Central Italy, was the association of himself with Byron and Shelley, in the production of a new quarterly, to be published by Murray, and to be called Tlie Liberal. When upon the day of Leigh Hunt's landing he had come face to face again with Lord Byron at Monte Nero, where the latter was living in villeggiatura, they had some difficulty in recognizing one another — Byron had grown so fat and Hunt so thin. Shortly after the latter had returned to Leghorn from that first meeting, he was visited at his hotel by Shelley, whose villeggiatura was at Lerici, and who almost imme- diately accompanied the travellers to Pisa, where he and Byron had, both of them, their town residence. Lord Byron quitting Monte Nero by pre-arrangement, at the same time, reached their place of destination almost simul- taneously. For, the new abode of the Hunts, in which Shelley was so eager to see them comfortably housed, was the ground-floor of Lord Byron's Pisan mansion, said to have been built by Michael Angelo, the Casa Lanfranchi on the river Arno. Leigh Hunt ever afterwards remembered with emotion one delightful afternoon, during Shelley's brief stay with his friends at Pisa, when the two of them wandered for hours about the old-world city, and visited together that wonderful grass-grown corner of it, where stand con- fronted, the Leaning Tower and the Cathedral. When the evening of that fatal day closed in, Shelley drove in a post- chaise to Leghorn, whence, urged on by a desponding note, which he found awaiting him there from his wife, lie took his departure sooner than he had intended, accompanied by his friend, Captain Williams, and a seaman named Charles Vivian, in an open boat, and in the midst of a terrific storm of thunder and lightning, on his return home to Lerici. From that moment, a week of terrible suspense dragged on A BIOGRAPHICAL IXTRODUCTIOX. xxix before the worst was known. Then the young poet's body was waslied on shore near the town of Via Reggio — in the jacket pocket being found, open, Leigh Hunt's copy of Keats's '' Lamia,'' borrowed on the day of his departure from Pisa, by Shelley, whose last reading of it liad evidently been interrupted by the sudden outbreak of the tempest. The catastrophe had occurred on the 8th July, and upon the 1 6th August, in the heavenliest weatlicr, on the shore of the gulf of Spezzia, with the blue waters of the Mediter- ranean lapping on the golden sands, Shelley's remains, in the presence of Byron, Hunt, and Trelawny, were, after the ancient fashion, burnt, with all the classic accompaniments of frankincense and libations of wine, with Keats's last volume of poetry, thrown as a finishing touch ujDon the funeral pile — " the flame of the fire bearing away towards heaven in vigorous amplitude, waving and quivering with a brightness of inconceivable beauty." Thence, the heart, which remained unconsumed, and which was given to Leigh Hunt, was, at the latter's instance, later on conveyed to Rome, where, under the inscription Cor cordium, it was reverently laid, hard by the tomb of Cestius, and not far from the grave of Adonais, in that English cemetery, sown even in winter with violets and daisies, of which Shelley himself had so recently written : '• It might make one in love with death, to think one should be buried in so sweet a place." Three months after this the first number of The Liberal reached Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt, at their Pisan home in the Casa Lanfranchi, containing, besides the former's "Vision of Judgment," and the latter's "Letter from Abroad," descriptive of Pisa, their dead friend's splendid version of the " Mayday ISTight," from the Faust of Goethe. As had previously been the case with The Reflector, no more than four numbers in all of The Lihercd made their appearance. In a monetary point of view it was a failure. It ceased in 1823, in which year, between the 5th July and the 27 th December, Hunt wrote, as an unstamped supple- ment to his old weekly journal in England, twenty-seven txx A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. niimber.s of the Literary Examiner, the first of which appeared as No. 67 of The Indicator. Shelley being now dead, Lord Byron found that upon himself alone would thenceforth devolve the responsibility of aiding Leigh Hunt, his sick wife and their numerous family, to secure for their support in Italy anything like a moderate competence. Living together under the same roof -beams at the Casa Lanfranchi, the daily existence of the two friends passed for some time very pleasantly. Byron's occupation as a rule, until long after midnight, was, at this period, the writing of his incomparable masterpiece, " Don Juan." Late in the morning, breakfast having been cleared away, he would be overheard singing some Italian aii-, generally one of Rossini's, in the courtyard, whence, ascend- ing into the little garden filled with orange-trees, he would cheerily call Leigh Hunt to his study-window, by the pla)'- ful name into which the two had been abbreviated by Shelley and himself — to wit, " Leontius." Emerging then from his room, the latter would saunter by the hour with his companion among the orange-bushes, Byron clad at that time in the airy costume of a nankin jacket with white waist- coat and trousers, and a peaked cap of either velvet or linen. Jarring incidents unhappily were only too soon, however, to drive the two friends into something like an estrange- ment. Leigh Hunt's pecuniary embarrassments were of such frequent recurrence, that they . came at last to be sources only of increasing worry and depression to Byron at the very time when all his thoughts and aspirations weie beginning to turn eagerly towards the fast nearing "War of Independence in Greece, in the furtherance of which his life was so soon afterwards to be heroically sacrificed. Imme- diately after Lord Byron, again, had pledged Leigh Hunt to undertake the conduct oiThe Zi6era?, he was disappointed to find that the latter had ceased to have any further interest in The Examiner than as a mere contributor ; so that his chief reliance seemed to be on the precarious foothold of the new venture. Added to all this, it must have been A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xxxi peculiarly unpalatable to Byron, who evidenced at all times the profoundest respect and admiration for Gift'ord as a critic, when Leigh Hunt, precisely at this inopportune moment, brought out, in 1823, his scathing satire on the ex-cobbler turned editor of The Quarterhj, under the signifi- cant title of '' Ultra-Crepidarius." Further and further in every sense, literally and metaphorically, the two fiiends drifted apart. By the 5th January 1824 Lord Byron had landed at Missolonghi, where on the 1 9th April following he so darkened the world with gloom by his abruj)t death, that 8ir Walter Scott compared it to the sun going down at noonday. Meanwdiile Leigh Hunt, deserted now in death by Byron, as, within three years before that time, he had been by Keats and 8helley, forlornly drifted, in Italy, over that soil of earthquakes and volcanoes which he has himself aptly described as "a great grapery built over a flue," to Boccaccio's suburban retreat of Maiano, about two miles from Florence. There, bent upon ekeing out in his usual way his modest income, he wrote in The Examiner a series of papers called " The Wishing Cap," the first of which appeared on the 28th October 1824, and the last on the T6th October 1825. In the latter year he further occupied his time, and slightly increased his means, by his brilliant rendering of Eedi's dithyrambic poem "Bacchus in Tuscany;" besides con- tributing to the Xeio Monthly Magazine a series of papers called "The Family Journal," which were signed by him Harry Honeycomb. Scared from Italy by his importunate needs and his isolated condition, he left his then residence, the Yilla Morandi at Maiano, for England, on the loth September 1825, and reached London on the i4tli October, taking up his abode there at first among the familiar sur- roundings of Highgate. What had considerably helped to hiasten his return homewards was an unfortunate litigation with his brother, to whom he had not long before fraternally inscribed his felicitous translation of the " Bacco in Toscana." Having returned to England with his fortunes marred xx-xii A BIOGKAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. and his health still broken, and with a painful sense upon him of his Italian excursion being regarded among his friends as nothing less than s^j fiasco, Leigh Hunt then com- mitted the one mistake of his life as an author, by publishing in 1828 his distressing and most regrettable work, entitled "Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries." It was written from first to last under the profoundest error of judgment. It drew down upon its author's head a very storm of obloquy. The book was eagerly read, but by the vast majority with burning indignation. Appearing origi- nally as a costly quarto volume embellished with cleverly engraved portraits of the author himself, of Keats, of Charles Lamb, and of the Countess Guiccioli, it seemed to flaunt rather significantly as its frontispiece the most odious caricature of Byron — a sort of ghostly silhouette re- versed — white, that is, on a black ground. It was recognized as of a piece with the letterpress, which was universally regarded as having been penned in the worst possible taste. So attractive was the theme, however — Byron, then, being a name to conjure with — that the work passed at once into a second edition in two volumes octavo. But, with that, its course was run out completely. As an authority it was obsolete on the morrow of its republication. And the time soon arrived when Leigh Hunt frankly acknowledged (among others, to myself) his profound regret that it had ever been produced. While living at Highgate in 1828, Hunt resumed his con- genial labours as a weekly essayist by issuing from the press in twenty-eight numbers a new j)eriodical entitled The ComjKinion, the first instalment of which was dated the 9tli January, and the last the 23rd July. Securing to itself readers fit certainly, but few, it ceased, like so many other of his serial issues for want of an adequate circulation. Having moved his family in 1829 from Highgate to Epsom, he there started a lighter and more gossipy weekly, called 27ie Chat of the Week, No. I of which appeared on the 5th June 1830, but with the thirteenth number, printed on the 28th August, its existence A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xxxiii terminated. Leigh Hunt then embarked upon a more onerous undertaking — namely, that of himself producing without the aid of any other contributor, a daily journal of litera- ture and the stage, called The Tatler. So long as his health could bear the unnatural strain, this he actually accom- plished. It so cruelly taxed his energies, however, that toAvards the close of its career he had no alternative but to call in extraneous assistance. Beginning on the 4th September iS3o,it ended its course on the 13th February 1832, his con- stantly recurring toils upon it, often extending far on past midnight into the small hours of the morning, more than once taxing his powers to the very uttermost. While still residing at Epsom, Leigh Hunt began writing, there, in the manner of a fictitious autobiography, his three volume novel of " Sir E-alph Esher," descriptive of the adventures of a gentleman of the days of the Common- wealth and of the Court of Charles II. On the mere pro- mise of his undertaking to write this work, his publisher, Mr. Colburn, had enabled him to return home from Italy. This historical romance, which was first published in 1832, ran into a second edition in 1836, and into a third in 1850, the last -mentioned imprint of the tale being inscribed to Lord John Russell. At the instance of John Forster, and indeed also at his expense, there were printed in 1832 v/liat may be termed tlie Articles of Faith of Leigh Hunt, entitled " Christianism, or Belief and L^nbelief Beconciled," being some thirty-one Exercises and Meditations. What was the crowning bene- faction of that year to Leigh Hunt howbeit, was the publi- cation by subscription of the first collected edition of his Poems. During that twelvemonth also he wrote a preface of thirty pages to the volume containing Shelley's ''Masque of Anarchy." From a sequestered part of Old Brompton, whither he had migrated in 1830 immediately on quitting Epsom, and where he had his old friend Charles Knight as his landlord, Leigh Hunt, in 1833, moved first of all for a while to St. John's Wood; and then back again to the Nev,- Eoad, c xxxiv A BlOOlUPHiCAL INTKODL'Ci'iOX. in which last home he all but died from the after-effects of his long-continued drudgery on the periodicals. Thence he passed on in a south-westerly direction to a quiet corner of Chelsea, where he settled down in a cul-de-sac near the river Thames, with a beautiful lime-tree immediately in front of his house, and where he first came to know Carlyle, whose acquaintance soon ripened into intimate friendship. Here again, in spite of his precarious health, he industriously set to work, contributing articles to Tail's Magazine between January and September, besides writing from the i6th August to the 2 6th December on the True Sun, an offshoot from The Sun, into which old journal that new-comer and rival was shortly afterwards absorbed. Collecting together a goodly assortment of his choicest essays, Leigh Hunt in 1834 published as a Miscellany for the Fields and Fireside two attractive volumes called after the periodicals in which they had originally appeared, " The Indicator and The Companion." In that same year he began, on the 2nd April, issuing from the press in w^eekly numbers — what was the delight of his readers for nearly two whole years,- not closing its career until the 26th December 1835. It was then completed in a noble double folio volume of 800 triple-columned pages as filled as an eg^ is with meat or as a pomegranate is with seeds, with essays, sketches, epigrams, anecdotes, criticisms, poems, and translations, as well as with the most carefully chosen selections from the wide world of literature. This, in fact, was one of the most famous and popular of all his periodicals — still occasionally to be met with, and always as a very treasure trove, on the old bookstalls — known and prized by every true book-fancier, when so encountered, as Leigh Hunfs London Journal. Has not Launcelot Cross written the daintiest panegyric upon it in a volumette of 57 pages octavo under the heading of " Characteristics of Leigh Hunt ? " In it among other peai-ls of price Leigh Hunt gave to the world his inimitable metrical fragment in celebration of that peerless magician of the bow, "■ Paganini." A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xxxv Aiding him, for one brief interval in its product ion, Hunt had at least one delicioiisly congenial contributor in poor dead and gone Egerton Webbe, whose grave-faced emula- tion of the classic epigrams of Martial resulted in such a preposterous imitation as this — TO THOMSON, CONCERNING DIXON AND JACKSON, How Dixon can with Jackson bear, You ask mc, Thomson, to declare, — Thomson, Dixon's Jackson's heir. llecalling which to mind, Leigh Hunt exclaims, '' Were ever three patronymics jumbled so together ? or with such a delightful importance 1 " — adding, '^It is like the jingling of the money in Jackson's pocket." From the very outset, the Journal was designed as indi- cated by Hunt's motto ^' to assist the inquiring, to animate the struggling, and to sympathize with all." While it was yet in mid-career he brought out in book form, as a striking denouncement of War, his poem of " Captain Sword and Captain Pen," his description in which of the incidents on the battlefield at night — such as the shriek of the horse, the bridegroom sabred in the ditch, and the taken city — are among his most powerful imaginings. Several poems and articles, it should be said here, were contributed by Hunt in 1835 and 1836 to the ^'^ew Monthly Maganne. Between July 1837 and March 1838 he wrote abundantly in The Monthly Repository — one of his best known effusions in which was his " Blue Stocking Revels, or the Feast of the Yiolets." His first contribution to one of the quarterlies was his article on " Lady Mary Wortley Montagu," in the Wesfiiiinsfer liet'iew for April 1837. During four years, from 1838 to 184 1, he was numbered upon the stafi:' of winters on The Monthly Chronicle, which within that interval was published in seven volumes by the Longmans. Before its completion, Leigh Hunt scored one of his most brilliant successes by the first night's performance, on Friday, the 7 th February 1840, at Covent Garden Theatre, of his singularly kxxvi A BIOGRAPHICAL lis'TRODUCTION. beautiful and poetic five-act play, "A Legend of Florence.'' Written in six weeks it was Avelcomed enthusiastically at the close of each act by its first audience, the apj)lanse on the fall of the curtain being, according to the Times report, tumultuous — each actor being called for in turn, and Leigh Hunt himself, the shyest of all shy men of letters, being finally summoned into the glare of the footlights to bow his acknowledgments. Four times during its first season it was witnessed by the young Queen. Ten years afterwards it was i-evived at Sadler s Wells, and on the 23rd January 1852 it was performed by Her Majesty's command at Windsor Castle. The triumph achieved by it, therefore, was something more than a mere succes cVestime. Its popularity was thoroughly genuine and spontaneous. During the same year in which the fortune of the drama was first secured, its author collected together, under the title of " The Seer, or Common Places Refreshed," the pick of the most entertaining papers in his London Journal. Then also, in 1840, he prefixed a brief but brilliant sketch of Sheridan, to the complete dramatic works of the author of the " Rivals " and the '^ School for Scandal." Written iii a kindred vein, but at greater length and with larger pre- tension, were the biographical and critical notices of Wj^cher- ley, Congreve, Yanburgh, and Farquhar, with which he in- troduced the goodly volume containing the dramatic master- pieces of those great playwrights of the Restoration. It w^as this work which suggested to Macaulay the theme of his masterly paper in the Edinhurgh Revien' on the *' Dramatists of the Restoration," the opening words of which so large a multitude of readers have since echoed — '^ We have a kind- ness for Mr. Leigh Hunt." After that it could hardly be matter for surprise to find Leigh Hunt himself contributing to the Edinhurgh in October 1841, the subject of his article therein being " The Colman Family." Prior to its appear- ance, in the earlier part of 1841, after having sojourned for seven years in the near neighbourhood of Carlyle, Leigh Hunt removed his home from Chelsea to Kensington. A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xxxvii There lie composed, for the most part in Kensington Gardens and Lord Holland's Walk, liis poetical love-story of Old Times called " The Palfrey," which was first published in 1842. Another collection of papers from his London. J onrncd was made by him in tlio following year, entitled '' One Hundred Romances of Ileal Life ;" while in 1844 he pro- duced, under the title of '• Imagination and Fancy," a volume of selections from the poets, with intercalary comments of his own, so attractive in its general cha- racter, that it rapidly won its way to popularity, running into a second edition in 1846, and into a third edition in 1852. A second contribution of his to the EdinhurgJi appeared in the number for July 1844, its subject being *' George Selwyn, his Correspondents and Contemporaries." AVliat rendered that year pre-eminently memorable to him- self, however, was the fact that within it was realized for him the most dearly cherished of all his day-dreams — the publication of poems by himself, produced in a cheap and popular form, as a handy volume, that might be easily carried in the pocket as a home companion, like those darling little duodecimos of Gray and Collins, so dearly loved by him in the happy days when he was a Bluecoat boy. Then also, in 1844, he was benefited by the generosity of the widow of liis '' friend of friends," Mrs. Shelley, and of her son, Sir Percy Shelley, who on succeeding to the family estates and the Baronetcy on the death of the poet's father, settled upon Leigh Hunt an annuity of ;^i20. During 1845 he contri- buted several minor poems to AinsivortJis Magazine, and one of rather larger dimensions, translated from the Italian of Berni, to the Xew Monthly Magazine, under the whimsical title of •' Lazy Corner, or Bed versus Business." For the first series of an amusing work, published in 1846, and called '• Heads of the People," being portraits of the English, drawn by Kenny Meadows, he penned character- istic sketches of " The Monthly Nurse," and " The Omnibus Conductor," among his fellow- contributors to this jDubli- cation being Douglas Jerrold, Laman Blanchard, Samuel xxxviii A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. Lover, and Thackeray. During that same year he brought out in two volumes, summaiized in prose, " Stories from the : Italian Poets," interspersed with the choicer passages from them daintily versified, and accompanied by the lives of Dante, Pulci, Boiardo, Tasso, and Ariosto. Familiar though the subject-matter of the work was to him, and delightful, as a very labour of love, though the toil of its compilation, 60 delicate was his health at this time, and so worn down was he by long continued anxiety and incessant occupation, that immediately after he had finished it he w\as prostrated by a serious illness. It was about this time that, at twentj^-two years of age, I began my twenty-five years editorship of the oldest of the daily London Journals after The Times, and it thenceforth became my privilege, among the many agreeable duties devolving upon me as a reviewer, to sit in judgment upon each of Leigh Hunt's subsequent works, at the time of its first appearance. The earliest of these was his mirthful selection from the poets, known as '• Wit and Humour." And attention is here directed to the circum- stance because, young though I was, Leigh Hunt, to ni}' great delight, did me the honour of seeking my personal acquaintance by reason of what I, as his anonymous critic, had written about him ; and when we were once brought together, that acquaintance, in spite of the disparity of years between us, soon ripened into an intimate and aftec- tionate friendship. Leigh Hunt contributed a series of papers to The Atlas during 1847, which papers fourteen years afterwards were collected together and posthumously published as a volume, entitled '' A Saunter through the West End." After forty years' incessant toil in the service of the periodicals and the booksellers, he was thus still drudging on as laboriously as ever in a vain endeavour to avoid running into del^t while supporting his family on the narrowest income. It became evident at last, not only to his personal friends but to the public at large, and eventually to the Government, that the A rJOGRAPHIOAL INTRODrC'J'JOX. xxxix claims of tlie veteran nutlior oiiglit at length to bo nngi'udgingly allowed, and his precarious fortunes in some degree assured. Twice before this date Lord Melbourne had obtained a i-oyal grant of ;!^2oo for Leigh Hunt, first from AVilliam IX., and upon the second occasion from the young Queen, as a temporary solatium. A letter addressed to him now, however, under date the 22nd June 1847, by Lord John Russell, announced to him that Her Majesty had conferred upon him an annual pension of ^£200 from the Civil List. ''Allow me to add," wrote the Premier in con- clusion, '"'that the severe treatment you formerly received, in times of unjust persecution of Liberal writers, enhances the satisfaction with which I make this announcement." A month afterwards ^^900 were placed to his credit, as the result of merely two nights' performance of Ben Jonson's "Every Man in his Humour," by Charles Dickens and his band of amateur comedians, half the amount being secured on the 26th July at Manchester, and half on the 28th at Liverpool. Towards the close of that year Leigh Hunt published in two volumes one of the most delightful collections of essays he had yet given to the world, under the title of '' Men, Women, and Books," In acknowledgment of what I had occasion to say about it as his unknown reviewer, he wrote to me, on Christmas Eve 1847, in my capacity as editor, thanking me very cordially for the opinion I had expressed. '' It is so very kind," he added in his letter, " that I Imrdly know how to put my thanks into words : " observing immediately after this to my amusement : '• I sometimes suspect that a friend of mine, in revenge for the high opinion I have of his genius, has been playing me a sort of trick. But, on the other hand, he (if it is he) shows such a desire to fetch out the best thino-s in the book (if I may use such words in speaking of it), that I cannot but put the most grateful construction on his most friendly abstinence from objection," — signing himself, after a word or two more, " your most obliged friend and servant. '- Leigh Hunt." xl A BIOaRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. Out of this grew our personal knowledge of each other, and my admission before long to the privilege of his inti- mate friendship. One of his most characteristic works appeared, in 1848, in ''A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla," daintily illustrated by Richard Doyle. This had been preceded, but a few months earlier in the same year, by his two charming volumes of ''The Town," descriptive of all the more interesting localities in London from St. Paul's to St. James's, and the materials of which had originally appeared fourteen years previously, in a series of supplements to Leigh Hunt's London Journal. In 1849 he contented himself with producing a couple of what artists depreca- tingly call mere pot-boilers. One was a miscellaneous selec- tion in two volumes, of Prose and Verse, entitled by him '^ A Book for a Corner." The other was a 3'et more fugi- tive collection of minor pieces, called ^' Readings for Railways.'' He was reserving himself, in fact, at this time, and was con- centrating all his best powers, with the ripened wisdom of experience, upon the production of his next book, which on its appearance in the following year, 1850, proved to be, incomparably, among all his works, his prose masterpiece. This was his enthralling "Autobiography," in three volumes, admirably well described by Carlyle as the record of '' a gifted, gentle, patient, and valiant human soul, as it buffets its way through the billows of time, and will not drown though often in danger : cannot he drowned, but conquers and leaves a track of radiance behind it." It justifies its right to be placed upon the same shelf with Lock- hart's Scott, and even with Boswell's Johnson. It accounts for the fact that those who knew him best rea^arded Leio-h Hunt — every one of them — with mingled feelings of love and respect. It was at the very heart of the nineteenth cen- tury that this manly record of his life was thus rounded to a close. While it was yet winning its way into the affections of its readers, its author was contributing poems alternately to Ainsioortlis Magazine and the Xeio Monthly, and at the A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUOTIOX. xli end of 1850 lie took heart of grace to set on foot the last of his periodicals. Simply and attractively entitled Leirjh Hunt'' s Journal., it had, however, one of the Iniefest runs of them all, extending only to seventeen numbers, its first issue appearing on the ytli December 1850, and its last on the 2 9tli March 1851. Within the year last mentioned, '' Table Talk," originally contributed to The Atlas, made its appearance in a separate and complete form. A great home grief befell Leigh Hunt, at the close of October 1852, in the death of his youngest son, Vincent ; and while the anguish of that loss was still freshly upon him, he pub- lished in 1853, under the title of '-'The Eeligion of the Heart,"' a Manual of Faith and Duty which was an expan- sion of his previous book called " Christianism." At this time he was still living at Kensington, from which place he supplied a series of articles to the columns of the J/usical Times between the December of 1853 and the November of 1854. His anecdotal memorials of that locality, quaintly dubbed by him '• The Old Court Suburb,"' appeared in two volumes in 1855, as did his own "Stories in Yerse, " then first collected. During the same twelvemonth he edited, with notes and an introductory preface of some elaboration, a collection of the finest scenes, lyrics, and other beauties, from the dramatic masterpieces of Beaumont and Fletcher. The following year, 1856, would have been a blank one in his career but for his being busily engaged towards its close in the careful revision of a complete edition of his Poetical Works in two volumes, published in 1857, at Boston in the United States. The crowning grief of his life came to him at the begin- ning of 1857, when his wife, who had been tlie sharer of all his joys and sorrows for nearly half a century, died at the age of sixty-nine, leaving him thenceforth with a sense, as he said, that he belonged as much to the next world as to this. One other literary enjoyment was yet reserved for him, meaning that of witnessing, on Wednesday, the 20th January 1858, the first performance; at the Lyceum The;^.tre, of xlii A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. Jiis three-act play of *' Lovers' Amazements." Three other di'amatic productions of his remain to this moment imprinted and unperformed— namely, what was originally called '* The Secret (and afterwards The Prince's) Marriage '' — a two-act piece called " The Double" — and '• Look to your Morals," a prose after-piece or little comedy. In the June of that year I addressed to him through Bentleys Miscellany^ under his Byronic or tShelleyan title of " Leontius," the lines which I am tempted to give at the end of this volume (see p. 524), if only by reason of their having caused him to write for me on the fly-leaf of my copy of his Poemp : " I wish I had happened to give this book to Charles Kent; but, not having done so, I can only take occasion from it to thank him for the honour he has done my verses by his own, and to wish him all the happiness in life due to those who love to bestow it. '• Leigh Hunt." l\vice before penning those words he had written letters to me on the same subject, expressing his cordial acknow- ledgments. During the first eight months of 1859 he was still indus- triously contributing to the periodicals. On the 1 5th January he began supplying the Spectator with a series of papers, headed " The Occasional," the sixteenth, and as it proved the last, of which appeared on the 20th of August. "While, as an evidence that the well-spring of poetic thought, which had so long been the delight of his existence, was still flowing, in spite of his being so far advanced in his seventy-fifth year, he wrote in the February number of Fraser''s Magazine a poem called '• The Tapiser's Tale," in imitation of Chaucer, and another in the May number, called "Tlie Shewe of Faire Seeming," in imitation of Spensei*. Altliongh by this time we had in many respects come to know each other thoroughly, it was characteristic of the gentle courtesy for which Leigh Hunt all through his life had been remarkable, and by which he had endeared him- A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xliii Kolf to more than one o-eneration of liis intimates, that, hy reason of liis silence to one so mncli hi.s junior as myself, for several weeks together in the summer of 1859,110 should, on the 29tli July, have gone out of his way to write me a long letter of most earnest apology for his apparent neglect. JIow I answered him may be inferred from his instant rej)ly, the o^Dening words of which were : " uMy dear and kind Forgiver, right Friend and Gentleman I '• Most relieved and thankful 3'our letter has made me, and most happy shall I be to see you to-morroAv (Tuesday) as close upon the hour you mention as possible." AYithout giving here the whole of the letter, which was couched throughout in terms of the utmost kindness, 1 will add in this place merely the very end of it, in which I found myself, not without emotion, thus addi'essed : '' Your letter expresses an amount of pleasure so much like my own, with the addition on my side of the certainty of being forgiven (such strange advantages sometimes may the culpable have over the guiltless !) that I also feel our present communication like a doublement of the bond between us. It is like one of the friendships of former days come back to me in my old age, as if in reward for my fidelity to their memory. '' Your affectionate friend, '• Leigh Hunt." He was then living in a little villa farther west than Kensington — it was his last home— in what he spoke of in one of his letters to me as " the not very atti-active sub- urbanity" of Hammersmith. \Yhen 1 arrived that evening he was alone, and in a mood at first of unusual pensiveness. He appeared eager at this period, whenever he could find the opportunity, to talk of the mysteries of the hereafter. It seemed to me later on that evening, when we had once more been left alone together to talk on thus late into the night, as if his thoughts reverted with an awful iov to the same high argument. Looking back to them now, I cannot help xliv A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. feeling that these were but the instinctive flutterings of his spirit as he felt the jarring back of the bolts of life at the portal of the grave, or as Young more finely terms it in his " Night Thoughts," that Dark Lattice letting in Eternal Day. For all that, he still evidenced the same insatiable appetite he had all through life betrayed for the sugar-plums of existence, the lumps of flowers and the snatches of melody. Yet to the last, too, he indulged in those freakish turns of thouglit and fantastic Avhimsicalities of expression, which brightened so delightfully at unexpected moments, all through his career, both his essay writing and his familiar conversation. As when he described Kinnaird the loyal magistrate listening reverently to " ' God save the King,' as if his soul had taken its hat oft'! " Or as when, recalling to mind his reception one day of Wordsworth in his study, under which was an archway leading to a nursery-ground, he mentioned that a cart happened to go through it while he was inquiring if his visitor would take any refreshment, and AYordsworth uttered in so lofty a voice the words, "Any- thing that is going forward^'' that he felt half inclined to ask him '• whether he would take a piece of the cart ! " Thus, still to the last, he could not resist the inclination to turn even one of his own infirmities into a jest — congratu- lating himself to me upon having that day lost a tooth, from the exultant sense it gave him of having made that addi- tional advance towards being etherealized ! How genially sympathetic" his whole nature was even when prostrated by the lassitude of age, and of profound exhaustion, his next letter to me, dated the 5th August, will sufficiently indicate. It ran thus : " My dear young Friend, good for keeping youth alive in the old ! " I have delayed answering your letter, in the hope of sending you a long one in return ; for it came to me at a moment when I was busv with work that I was unal^le to set A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xlv aside. But whiii thus engrossed me has so knocked me up, that I cannot well settle myself down to anything but pure nullification, and a solitary word. You must therefore suppose, that in this brief response, I feel all which I do not express — all which is due to the pleasure you gave us the other evening. I thank you also in my own heterodox par- ticular for the kindly toleration which my opinions received from one who is so earnest in his own ; and am most ti-uly and heartily your aftectionate friend, ••Leigh Hunt." One other communication I w^as to receive from him — and but one, which came to me three days afterwards. Mere memorandum though it was — pledging me to go to him on the following afternoon — it was one. as the sequel showed, full of significance, closing with a benison that sounds almost like a prophetic farewell. Written on the 8th August, witliout any preamble, it said : '•' To-morrow (Tuesday) by all means. And the evening will suit me better than any other, for a very curious ex- temporaneous reason as you will hear."' The reason being simply that, had I gons after that evening, I should have found he had already taken his departure from home, in search of health at a friend's house upon the opposite bank of the Thames. Continuing his note, he then added — ■ " Ainsworth's words are very valuable to me, and I thank you heartily for them. Indeed I never knew either his words or his handsome face turned upon me but in kindness. *' All blessings attend you, prays '• Your aftectionate friend, <' Leigh Hunt." Early on the following evening (Wednesday, the 9th August) I was with him again — it was for the last time for him and for me — at that last of all his London homes, 7 Cornwall Eoad, Hammersmith. There I re- xivi A BIOGEAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. mained with him in the midst of the home group of his daughters and his grandchildren, until long after nightfall. In all my intercourse with him I never remember him more delightful.* Tliroughout the evening he charmed us all by his varying moods, according to the fluctuating themes of the conversation among us. Late that night we all stood at the garden-gate of his little villa to see him drive away to the house of his old friend, Mr. Charles Reynell, at Putney, where so soon afterwards, on the 28th of August 1859, he died when within two months of the completion of his seventy-fifth year. He was buried in his own chosen resting-place, in Kensal Green Cemetery, where for the next ten years his grave remained unmarked by any monument. During that interval, however, funds were raised among his friends for the erection of a suitable memorial. Designed by Joseph Durham, A.E.A., and costing no more than ;^i5o, thanks to the generosity of the sculptor, who willingly undertook the work for the mere expense of employed labour and materials, it bore on its front, below a life-like bust of the poet, his name, with the dates of his birth and death, and as its most appro- priate motto his own words — Write me as one who loves his fellow-men. In the presence of a number of the admirers and intimate personal friends of Leigh Hunt, this memoiial was, on the 19th October 1869, uncovered by the late Lord Houghton. The last contribution from his industrious hand to the periodicals appeared before the close of the year of his death in the December number of F reiser's Magazine, it being his posthumous vindication of his especial * In the Dublin University 31agazine for November 1861, I wrote R paper entitled " Leigh Hunt's Last Evening at Home," which I afterwards elaborated into the monograph of " Leigh Hunt — the Town Poet," in a work of mine called " Footprints on the Road,' published in 1864 by the Messrs. Chapman and Hall. — Ed. A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. xivii tWourite Spenser, in an article entitled " English Poetry versus Cardinal Wiseman." In the following year, i860, there were published, under the editorship of his eldest son, '• The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt," in two volumes, and in one volume a complete edition of his collected Poems. Upon these latter, and upon his choicest Essays, will rest now whatever may be durable in his gentle and graceful reputation. In all that I have here written in his regard, I have as certainly nothing extenuated as I have assuredly set down nought in malice. It should be added that this typical man of letters, who in the early part of his career was for years reviled with the utmost scurrility by some of the leading critics of his time, as though he had been the vilest of volup- tuaries, was throughout his life remarkable above all things for this, that he was the most frugal and abstemious of men. His drink, as a rule, was water : the food he consumed was principally bread ; his raiment was always plain and economical. He was the shyest and most domestic of home-loving students. Like Alban Butler, he was hardly ever to be seen without a book in his hand, or in his pocket, or on the table beside him at his elbow. Except when he was sauntering out of doors alono- the leafy lanes, or through the green fields of the London suburbs he chiefly delighted in, he was, day after day, pen in hand, working from early morning until long past mid- night. As Thornton Hunt happily said of him, he Avas striving all his life to open more widely the door of the library, and the windoY^-s looking out upon Xature. What- ever faults he had, when they came to be examined proved to be mere foibles. Remarkable throughout life for his tall, slight figure, and dark complexion, his black eyes sparkled with intellect and good-humour, while his carriage and manner in his intercourse with his fellow-creatures were extraordinarily animated. As an artist in words, even when he held the pen as a mere translator, his style was often characterized by the rarest felicities, as where, in echoing idviii A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION". the immortal i4tli line of the 31st carmen of Catullus, '* Ad Sirmionem Peninsulam," he rendered the — Ridete quicquicT est domi cachiunorum — ■ Laughs every dimple on the cheek of home. When referring to the natural gaiety and sprightline.ss of Leigh Hunt and his abounding animal spirits, Hazlitt takes occasion to say that what he calls " the vinous quality of his mind " produced an immediate fascination and intoxication in those who came in contact with him. Upon which Pro- fessor Dowden very justly observes that, instead of the heavy liquor implied by Hazlitt's words, what coursed through the veins of his friend, was a bright, light wine — Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance and Proven9al song and sunburnt mirth. It typifies, on the one hand, as it seems to me, that blithe philosophy of the hearth, which he was ever striving to disseminate, that his very first essay, with which I there- fore here naturally commence, should have been " A Day by the Fire ; " and on the other hand, that genial gospel of what scholiasts call the humanities, which he was always en- deavouring to scatter among his fellow-men, that one of the very last, with which I therefore bring this collection to a close, was one inculcating above all things among his brother writers the good accruing from the cultivation of •'* Cheer- fulness in English Literature." LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. When the Author was a boy at school, he used to look at one of the pocket volumes of Cooke's Edition of Gray, ColHns, and others, then in course of publication, and fancy that if ever he could produce anything of that sort, in that shape, he should consider himself as having attained the happiest end of a human being's existence. The form had become dear to him for the contents, and the reputation seemed proved by the cheapness. In respect of his wishes for his mere self, they are precisely the same as they were then; and when Mr. Moxon proposed to him the present volume, he seemed to realize the object of his life, and to require no other prosperity.— Pr^T^^ to the 1844 Edition of ''The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt.*' LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. THE STOEY OF RIMINI. (1816.) THE OCCASION. 'Tis morn, and never did a lovelier day Salute Ravenna from its leafy bay ; For a warm eve, and gentle rains at night, Have left a sparkling welcome for the light, And April, with his white hands wet with flowers, Dazzles the bridemaids, looking from the towers: Green vineyards and fair orchards, far and near, Glitter with drops ; and heaven is sapphire clear. And the lark rings it, and the pine-trees glow, And odours from the citrons come and go. And all the landscape — earth, and sky, and sea — Breathes like a bright-eyed face that laughs out openly, 'Tis natui-e, full of spirits, waked and loved. E'en sloth, to-day, goes quick and unreproved ; For where's the living soul, priest, minstrel, clown, IVl^erchant, or lord, that speeds not to the town ? Hence happy faces, striking through the green Of leafy roads, at every turn are seen ; And the far ships, lifting their sails of white J^ike joyful hands, come up with scattered Hghfc; LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. Come gleaming up — true to the wished-for day — ■ And cliase the whistling brine, and swirl into the bay. And well may all the world come crowding there, If peace returning, and processions rare, And, to crown all, a marriage in the spring Can set men's hearts and fancies on the wing ; For, on this beauteous day, Ravenna's pride — The daughter of their prince — becomes a bride ; A bride to ransom an exhausted land ; And he, whose victories have obtained her hand, Has taken with the dawn — so flies report — His promised journey to the expecting Court, With hasting pomp, and squires of high degree. The bold Giovanni, Lord of Rimini. A GLIMPSE OF THE PAGEANT. First come the trumpeters, clad all in white. Except the breast, which wears a scutcheon bright. By four and four the}' ride, on horses grey ; And as they sit along their easy way, To the steed's motion yielding as they go, Each plants his trumpet on his saddle-bow. The heralds next appear, in vests attired, Of stiffening gold with radiant colours fired ; And then the pursuivants who wait on these, All dressed in painted richness to the knees ; Each rides a dappled horse, and bears a shield, Charged with three heads upon a golden field. Twelve ranks of squires come after, twelve in one, With forked pennons lifted in the sun, Which tell, as they look backward in the wind, The bearings of the knights that ride behind. Their horses are deep bay ; and every squire His master's colour shows in his attune. These past, and at a lordly distance, come The knights themselves, and fill the quickening hum- The flower of Rimini. Apart they ride. Two in a rank, their falchions by their side, TilE STOEY OF KIMINI. But otherwise unarmed, and clad in hues Such as their ladies had been pleased to choose, Bridal and gay — orange, and pink, and white — All but the scarlet cloak for every knight ; Which thrown apart, and hanging loose behind, Bests on the horse, and ruffles in the wind. The horses, black and glossy every one, Supply a further stately unison — A. solemn constancy of martial show ; Their frothy bits keep wrangling as they go. The bridles red, and saddle-cloths of white. Match well the blackness with its glossy light, While the rich horse-cloths, mantling half the steed, Are some of them all thick with golden thread ; Others have spots, on grounds of different hue — As burning stars upon a cloth of blue ; Or heart's-ease purple with a velvet light, Bich from the glary yellow, thickening bright j Or silver roses in carnation sewn, Or flowers in heaps, or colours pure alone : But all go sweejDing back, and seem to dress The forward march with loitering stateliness. FRANCESCA'S FIEST SIGHT OF PAOLO. The talk increases now, and now advance. Space after space, with many a sprightly prance, The pages of the Court, in rows of three ; Of white and crimson in their livery. Space after space, and still the train appear; A fervent whisper fills the general ear — " Ah — yes — no ! 'tis not he, but 'tis the squires Who go before him when his pomp requires." And now his huntsman shows the lessening train, Now the squire-carver, and the chambejlain ; And now his banner comes, and now his shield, Borne by the squire that waits him to the field ; And then an interval — a lordly space ; A pin-drop silence strikes o'er all the place. The Princess, from a distance, scai'cely knows Which way to look; her colour comes and goes, LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. And, with an impulse like a piteous plea, She lays her hand upon her father's knee, Who looks upon her with a laboured smile, Gathering it up into his own the while, When some one's voice, as if it knew not how To check itself, exclaims, " The Prince ! now, now ! " Upon a milk-white courser, like the air, A glorious figure springs into the square : Up, with a burst of thunder, goes the shout, And rolls the trembling walls and peopled roofs about. Never was nobler finish of fair sight — 'Twas like the coming of a shape of light ; And many a lovely gazer, with a start. Felt the quick pleasure smite across her heart. The Princess, who at first could scarcely see. Though looking still that way from dignity. Gathers new courage as the praise goes round, And bends her eyes to learn what they have found. And see — his horse obeys the check unseen, And, with an air 'twixt ardent and serene, Letting a fall of curls about bis brow, He takes, to all, his cap ofi" with a bow. Then for another, and a deafening shout, And scarfs are waved, and flowers come pouring out j And, shaken by the noise, the reeling air Sweeps with a giddy whirl among the fair. And whisks their garments and their shining hair. With busy interchange of wonder glows The crowd, and loves his bravery as he goes; But on his shape the gentler sight attends, Moves as he passes, as he bsnds him bends — Watches his air, his gesture, and his face. And thinks it never saw such manly grace ; So fine are his bare throat, and curls of black — So lightsomely dropt in, his lordly back, His thigh so fitted for the tilt or dance, So heaped with strength, and turned with elegance ; But, above all, so meaning in his look. As easy to be read as open book ; ME STORY OF RIMINI. And such true gallantry the sex descries In the grave thanks within his cordial eyes. His haughty steed, who seems by turns to be Vexed and made proud by that cool mastery, Shakes at his bit, and rolls his eyes with care, Reaching with stately step at the fine air ; And now and then, sideling his restless pace. Drops with his hinder legs, and shifts his place, And feels through all his frame a fiery thrill ; The princely rider on his back sits still, And looks where'er he likes, and sways him at his will. SOUND OF THE ANGELUS BELL. So ride they pleased ; — till now the couching sun Levels his final look through shadows dun ; And the clear moon, with meek o'er-lifted face, Seems come to look into the silvering place. Then woke the bride indeed, for then was heard The sacred bell by which all hearts are stirred — The tongue 'twixt heaven and earth, the memory mild, Which bids adore the Mother and her Child. The train are hushed; they halt; their heads are bare; Earth for a moment breathes angelic air. Francesca weeps for lowliness and love ; Her heart is at the feet of Her w^ho sits above. THE FATAL READING-. Keady she sat with one hand to turn o'er The leaf, to which her thoughts ran on before, The other on the table, half enwreathed In the thick tresses over wdiich she breathed. So sat she fixed, and so observed was she Of one, who at the door stood tenderly — Paolo — who from a window seeing her Go straight across the lawn, and guessing where, Had thought she was in tears, and found, that day, His usual efforts vain to keep away. Twice had he seen her since the Prince was gone, On some small matter needing unison ; Twice lingered, and conversed, and grown long friends But not till now where no one else attends. LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. ••' May I come inl " said he : — it made lier start- That smiling voice ; — she coloured, pressed her heart A moment, as for breath, and then with free And usual tone said, — " O yes, certainly." There's wont to be, at conscious times like these, An affectation of a bright-eyed ease. An air of something quite serene and sure, As if to seem so, were to be, secure. With this the lovers met, with this they spoke, With this sat down to read the self-same book, And Paolo, by degrees, gently embraced With one permitted arm her lovely waist ; And both their cheeks, like peaches on a tree, Came with a touch together thrillingly. And o'er the book they hung, and nothing said, And every lingering page grew longer as they read. And thus they sat, and felt with leaps of heart Their colour change, they came upon the part Where fond Genevra, with her flame long nurst, Smiled upon Launcelot, when he kissed her first : That touch, at last, through every fibre slid ; And Paolo turned, scarce knowing what he did. Only he felt he could no more dissemble. And kissed her, mouth to mouth, all in a tremble. Oh, then she wept — the poor Francesca wept ; And pardon oft he prayed ; and then she swept The tears away and looked him in the face. And, well as words might save the truth disgrace, She told him all, up to that very hour. The father's guile, th' undwelt-in bridal bower — And wished for wings on which they two might soar Far, far away, as doves to their own shore, With claim from none. — That day they read no moro. THE HUSBAND'S VENGEANCE. The spiteful fop I spoke of, he that set His eyes at work to pay his anger's debt — This idiot, prying from a neighbouring tower, Had watched tlie lover to the lady's bower, And flew to make a madman of her lord, Just then encamped with loss, a shame his soul abhorred. THE STORY OF RIMINI. < Pale first, tlien red, his eyes upon the stretch, Then deadly white, the husband heard the wretch, Who in soft terms, almost with liu'kinfjf smile, llan on, expressing his ''regret " tlie while. The husband, prince, crii^ple, and brother heard ; Then seemed astonislicd at the man ; then stirred His tongue but could not speak ; then dashed aside His chair as he arose, and loudly cried, '' Liar and mndman ! thou art he was seen Risking the fangs which thou hast rushed between, Regorge the filth in thy detested throat." And at the word, with his huge fist he smote Like iron on the place, then seized him all, And dashed in swoon against the bleeding wall. 'Twas dusk : — he summoned an old chieftain stern, Giving him charge of all till his return, And with one servant got to horse and rode All night, until he reached a lone abode Not far. from the green bower. Next day at noon. Through a byAvay, free to himself alone. Alone he rode, yet ever in disguise, His hat pulled over his assassin eyes. And coming through the wood, there left his horse, Then down amid the fruit-trees, half by force, Made way ; and by the summer house's door, Which he found shut, paused till a doubt was o'er. Paused, and gave ear. There was a low sweet voice : The door was one that opened without noise ; And opening it, he looked within, and saw, Nought hearing, nought suspecting, not in awe Of one created thing in earth or skies. The lovers, interchanging words and sighs. Lost in the heaven of one another's eyes. " To thee it was my father wedded me," Francesca said : — " T never loved but thee. The rest was ever but an ugly dream." " Damned be the soul that says it," cried a scream. Horror is in the room — shrieks — roaring cries, Parryings of feeble palms — blindly shut eyes : What, without arms, availed giief, strength, despair? Or what the two poor hands put forl.h in prayer / io LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. Hot is the dagger from the brother's heart, Deep in the wife's : — dead both and dashed apart, Mighty the murderer felt as there they lay ; Miglity, for one huge moment, o'er his prey ; Then, like a drunken man, he rode away. To tell what horror smote the people's ears, The questionings, the amaze, the many tears. The secret household thoughts, the public awe, And how those ran back shrieking, that first saw The beauteous bodies lying in the place, Bloody and dead in midst of all their grace. Would keep too long the hideous deed in sight ; Back was the slayer in his camp that night ; And fell next day with such a desperate sword Upon the rebel army at a ford. As sent the red news rolling to the sea, And steadied his wild nerves with victory. THE FEAST OF THE POETS. {The Beflector, No. 4, 1S12.) Apollo then led through the door without state, Each bard, as he followed him, blessing his fate ; And by some charm or other, as each took his chair, There burst a most beautiful wreath in his hair. I can't tell 'em all, but the groundwork was bay ; And Campbell, in his, had some oak-leaves and may ; And South ey a palm-branch, and Moore had a vine. And pepper-leaf Byron, surmounted with pine ; And mountain-ash Wordsworth, with groundsel and yew ; And Coleridge the rare petals four, that endue Their finder with magic ; and, lovely to tell, They sparkled with drops from Apollo's own well. Then Apollo put his on, that sparkled with beams, And rich rose the feast as an epicure's dreams ; Not epicure civic, or grossly inclined, But such as a poet might dream ere he dined : 'rilE SONG OF CERES. ll For the god Iiad no sooner determined the fare, Than it turned to whatever wms racy and rare ; The fish and the flesh, for example, were done, On account of their fineness, in llame from the sun ; The wines were all nectar of different smack, To which Muscat Vv-as nothing, nor Yirginis Lac, No, nor even Johannisberg, soul of the Tlhine, Nor Montepulciano, though king of all wine. Then, as for the fruits, you might garden for ages. Before you could raise me such apples and gages ; And all on the table no sooner were spread, Than their cheeks next the god blushed a beautiful red. 'Twas magic in short, and deliciousness all ; The very men-servants grew handsome and tall ; To velvet-hung ivory the furniture turned The service with opal and adamant burned ; Each candlestick changed to a pillar of gold, While a bundle of beams took the place of the mould. The decanters and glasses pure diamond became, And the corkscrevv^ ran solidly round into flame ; In a w^ord, so completely forestalled were the wishes, E'en harmony struck from the noise of the dishes. THE SONG OF CEKES. (The Descent of Liberty, a Masque, 1815.) Oh, thou that art our Queen again. And may in the sun be seen again. Come, Ceres, come, For the war's gone home, And the fields are quiet and green again, The air, dear goddess, sighs for thee. The light-heart brooks arise for thee, And the jioppies red On their wistful bed Turn up their dark blue eyes for thee. 13 LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. Laugh out in the loose green jerkin That's lit for a goddess to work in, With shoulders brown, And the wheaten crown ^ About thy temples perking. r And with thee come, Stout Heart in, And Toil, that sleeps his cart in, And Exercise, The ruddy and wise. His bathed forelocks parting. And Dancing too, that's lither Than willow or birch, drop hither, To thread the place With a finishing grace, And carry our smooth eyes with her. [Enter three rustic figures of Stout Heaet, Toil, and Exercise, with a band of Reapers and Vine-gatherers, male and female, — the first a manly swain in corduroy with an oaken cudgel, the second in white with a fork over his shoulder, the third in green with a vaulting-staff, and buskined. The rest of the men have sickles and pruning-hooks at their side, handled like swords and hanging from sword-belts ; the women are in short white gowns with rose-coloured bodices, and straw hats with ribands. To them, overhead, enter Ceres reclining on a horn of plenty, and gliding slowly along on a summer- cloud. She is a iDlump and laughing figure, dressed in a loose green bodice, with bare shoulders, large auburn curls, and a crown of wheat. As she goes along she makes joyful salutes to Peice and Liberty, and the background breaks into golden fields of corn that wave in the sunshine, while vines run over a hill in the distance, and the trees in front are hung with them like garlands from bough to bough. TRIO AND CHORUS. All joy to the giver of wine and of corn, With her elbow at ease on her well-filled horn, To the sunny cheek brown, And the shady wheat croAvn, And the ripe golden locks that come smelling of morn. Stout Heart. 'Tis she in our veins that puts daily delight. TO THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE CRICKET. 13 Toil. 'Tis she in our beds puts us kindly at night. Exercise. And ta^is at our doors in the morning bright. Chorus. Then joy to the giver, etc. We'll fling on our ilaskets,and forth with the sun, With our trim-ankled yoke-fellows, every one ; We'll gather and reap With our arm at a sweep, And oh ! for the dancing when all is done ; Exercise. Yes, yes, we'll be up when the singing-bird starts. Toil. We'll level her harvests, and fill up her carts ; Stout Heart. And shake off fatigue with our bounding hearts. Chorus. Then hey for the flasket, &c. [By this time Ceres has crossed the scene, and a sunbeam suddenly striking down to the middle of it in front of Liberty, a lightsome fig-ure, with wings at her feet and shoulders, comes rapidly tripping down it, and, taking a spring before she reaches the bottom, leaps into a graceful attitude of preparation. TO THE CRASSHOPPER AND THE CRICKET. (December 30, 1S16.) Green little vaulter in the sunny grass, Catching your heart up at the feel of June, Sole voice that's heard amidst the lazy noon, When even the bees lag at the summoning brass And you, warm little housekeeper, who class With those who think the candles come too soon. Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune Nick the glad silent moments as they pass ; Oh sweet and tiny cousins, that belong. One to the fields, the other to the hearth, Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong At your clear hearts; and both seem given to earth To ring in thoughtful ears this natural song — Indoors and out, summer and winter. Mirth. 14 LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. TO JOHN HUNT, ^TAT. FOUR. (1816.) Ah, little ranting Johnny, For ever blithe and bonny, And singing nonny, nonny, With hat just thrown upon ye ; Or whistling hke the thruslies With voice in silver gushes ; Or twisting random posies With daisies, w^eeds, and roses ; And strutting in and out so, Or dancing all about so. With cock-up nose so lightsome. And sidelong eyes so brightsome, And cheeks as ripe as apples, And head as rough as Dapple's, And arms as sunny shining As if their veins they'd wine in ; And mouth that smiles so truly, Heaven seems to have made it newly It breaks into such sweetness With merry-lipped completeness ; Ah Jack, ah Gianni mio. As blithe as Laughing Trio, — Sir Kichard, too, you rattler, So christened from the Tatler, — My Bacchus in his glory, My little Cor-di-fiori. My tricksome Puck, my Eobin, Who in and out come bobbing, As full of feints and frolic as That fibbing rogue Autolycus, And play the graceless robber on Your grave-eyed brother Oberon, — Ah ! Dick, ah Dolce-riso, How can you, can you be so ? One cannot turn a minute, But mischief — there you're in it, TO JOHN HUNT, iETAT. FOUR. 15 A-getting at my books, John, AVith mighty bustling looks, John j Or poking at the roses, In midst of which yonr nose is ; Or climbing on a table, No matter how unstable. And turning up your quaint eve And half shut teeth with " Mayn't 1 1 " Or else you're off at play, John, Just as you'd be all day, John, With hat or not, as happens, And there you dance, and clap Imnd.^, Or on the grass go rolling. Or plucking flowers, or bowling, And getting me expenses With losing balls o'er fences ; Or, as the constant trade is, Are fondled by the ladies With " What a young rogue this is ! '* Keforming him with kisses ; Till suddenly you cry out, As if you had an eye out, So desperately tearful. The sound is really fearful; When lo ! directly aft-er, It bubbles into laughter. Ah rogue ! and do you know, John, Why 'tis we love you so, John ? And how it is they let ye Do what you like and pet ye. Though all who look upon ye. Exclaim, " Ah Johnny, Johnny ! " It is because you please 'em Still more, John, than you tease em Because too, when not present, The thought of you is pleasant ; Because, though such an elf, John, They think that if yourself, John, Had something to condemn too, You'd be as kind to them too ; I6 LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS In short, because you're very Good-tempered, Jack, and merry; And are as quick at giving, As easy at receiving ; And in tlie midst of pleasure Are certain to find leisure To think, my boy, of ours, And bring us lumps of flowers. But see, the sun shines brightly ; Come, put your hat on rightly, And we'll among the bushes. And hear your friends the thrushes ; And see what flowers the weather Has rendered fit to gather ; And, when we home must jog, you Shall ride my back, you rogue you, Your hat adorned with fine leaves, Horse-chestnut, oak, and vine-leaves ; And so, with green o'erhead, John, Shall whistle home to bed, John. THOUGHTS ON THE AVON. (September 28, 1817.) It is the lovehest day that we have had This lovely month, sparkHng and full of cheer: The sun has a sharp eye, yet kind and glad ; Colours are doubly bright : all things appear Strong outlined in the spacious atmosphere ; And through the lofty air the white clouds go, As on their way to some celestial show. The banks of Avon must look well to-day; Autumn is there in all his glory and treasure ; The river must run bright ; the ripples play Their crispest tunes to boats that rock at leisuie; The ladies are abroad with cheeks of pleasure ; And the rich orchards in their sunniest robes Are pouting thick with all their winy globes. TO THORNTON HUNT, yETAT. SIX. 17 And why must I be thinking of the pride Of distant bowers, as if I had no nest To sing in here, though by the houses' side 1 As if I could not in a minute rest In leafy fields, quiet, and self-possest, Having, on one side, Hampstead for my looks, On t'other, London, with its wealth of books 'I It is not that I envy autumn there, Nor the s^veet river, though my fields have none ; Nor 3'et that in its all-productive air Was born Humanity's divinest son. That sprightliest, gravest, wisest, kindest one — Shakspeare ; nor yet, oh no — that here I miss Souls not unworthy to be named with his. No ; but it is, that on this very day, And upon Shakspeare's stream, a little lower, Where, drunk with Delphic air, it comes away Dancing in perfume by the Peary Shore, AYas born the lass that I love more and more : A fruit as fine as in the Hesperian store, Smooth, roundly smiling, noble to the core ; An eye for art : a nature, that of yore Mothers and daughters, wives and sisters wore, When in the golden age one tune they bore ; Marianne, — who makes my heart and very rhymes run o'er. TO THOKNTON HUNT, ^TAT. SIX. (1S17.) Sleep breathes at last from out thee, My little, patient boy ; And balmy rest about thee Smooths off the day's annoy. I sit me down, and think Of all thy winning ways ; Yet almost wish, with sudden shrink- That I had less to praise. c J ) ig LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. Thy sidelong pillowed meekness, Thy thanks to all that aid, Thy heart, in pain and weakness, Of fancied faults afraid ; The little trembling hand That wipes thy quiet tears, These, these are things that may demand Dread memories for years. Sorrows I've had, severe ones, I will not think of now ; And calmly 'midst my dear ones Have wasted with dry brow^ ; But when thy fingers press And pat my stooping head, I cannot bear the gentleness — The tears are in thy bed. Ah, first-born of thy mother. When life and hope were nev/, Kind playmate of thy brother. Thy sister, father too ; My light, where'er I go. My bird, when prison-bound, My hand in hand companion — no, My prayers shall hold thee round. To say " He has departed " — " His voice " — " his face " — is gone ; To feel impatient-hearted. Yet feel we must bear on ; Ah, I could not endure To whisper of such woe, Unless I felt this sleep ensure That it will not be so. Yes, still he's fixed, and sleeping I This silence too the while — Its very hush and creeping Seem whispering us a smile: Something divine and dim Seems going by one's ear. Like parting wings of Seraphim, Who say, " We've finished here." ON A L0(JK OF MILTON'S HA IK. i^ QUIET EVENINGS. (1817.) Dear Barnes, whose native taste, solid and clear, The throng of life has strengthened without harm, You know the rural feeling, and the charm That stillness has for a world-fretted ear : 'Tis now deep whispering all about me here With thousand tiny hushings, like a swarm Of atom bees, or fairies in alarm. Or noise of numerous bliss from distant sphere. This charm our evening hours duly restore — Nought heard through all our little, lulled abode, Save the crisp fire, or leaf of book turned o'er, Or watch-dog, or the ring of frosty road. Wants there no other sound, then 1 — yes, one more — The voice of friendly visiting, long owed. ON A LOCK OF MILTON'S HAIR. {Foliage, 1818.) It lies before me there, and my own breath Stirs its thin outer threads, as though beside The living head I stood in honoured pride, Talking of lovely things that conquer death. Perhaps he pressed it once, or underneath Ran his fine fingers, when he leant, blank-eyed, And saw, in fancy, Adam and his bride With their rich locks, or his own Delphic wreath. There seems a love in hair, though it be dead. It is the gentlest, yet the strongest thread Of our frail plant — a blossom from the tree Surviving the proud trunk ; — as though it said Patience and Gentleness is Power. In me Behold aiTectionate eternity. 30 LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. THE PANTHER, (iSiS.) The panther leaped to the front of his lair, And stood with a foot up, and snuffed the air; He quivered his tongue from his panting mouth, And looked with a yearning towards the south ; For he scented afar in the coming breeze News of the gums and their blossoming trees ; And out of Armenia that same day He and his race came bounding away. Over the mountains and down to the plains Like Bacchus's panthers with wine in their veins, They came where the woods wept odorous rains ; And there, with a quivering, every beast Fell to his old Pamphylian feast. The people who lived not far away, Heard the roaring on that same day ; And they said, as they lay in their carpeted room?!, *'The panthers are come, and are drinking the gums;" And some of them going with swords and spears To gather their share of the rich round tears, The panther 1 spoke of followed them back; And dvimbly they let him tread close in the track. And lured him after them into the town ; And then they let the portcullis down. And took the panther, which happened to be The largest was seen in all Pamphily. / By every one there was the panther admired, ' So fine was his shape and so sleekly attired, And such an air, both princely and swift. He had, when giving a sudden lift To his mighty paw, he'd turn at a sound, And so stand panting and looking around. As if he attended a monarch crowned. And truly, they wondered the more to behold About his neck a collar of gold, On which was written, in characters broad. " Arsaces the king to the Nysian god." HERO AND LEANDEE. 21 So tliey tied to the collar a golden chain, Which made the panther a captive again, And by degrees he grew fearful and fttill. As though he had lost his lordly will. But now came the spring, when free-bcrn leva Calls up nature in forest and grove, And makes each thing leap forth, and be Loving, and lovely, and blithe as he. The panther he felt the thrill of the air, And he gave a leap up, like that at his lair ; He felt the sharp sweetness more strengthen his veins Ten times than ever the spicy rains, And ere they're aware, he has burst his chains : He has burst his chains, and ah, ha ! he's gone, And the links and the gazers are left alone, And oft* to the mountain the panther's flown. Now what made the panther a prisoner be ? Lo ! 'twas the spices and luxury. And what set that lordly panther free ? 'Twas Love ! — 'twas Love ! — 'twas no one but he. HERO AND LEAXDER. (1819.) Sweet Hero's eyes, three thousand years ago, Were made precisely like the best we know. Looked the same looks, and spoke no other Greek Than eyef> of honeymoons begun last Aveek. Alas ! and the dread shock that stunned her brow Strained them as wide as any wretch's now. I never think of poor Leander's fate, And how he swam, and how his bride sat late, And watched the dreadful dawning of the light, But as I would of two that died last night. So might they now have lived, and so have died ; The story's heart, to me, still beats against its side. 22 LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. Fair is the morn, the soft trees kiss and breathe ; Calm, blue, and glittering is the sea beneath : And by the window a sweet maiden sits, Grave with glad thoughts, and watching it by fits, For o'er that sea, drawn to her with delight, Her love Leander is to come at night ; To come, not sailing, or with help of oar, But with his own warm heart and arms — no more— A naked bridegroom, bound from shore to shoi-e, A priestess Hero is, an orphan dove, Lodged in that turret of the Queen of Love ; A youth Leander, borne across the strait. Whose wealthy kin deny him his sweet mate, Beset with spies, and dogged with daily spite ; But he has made high compact with delight, And found a wondrous passage through the weltering night. At last, with twinkle o'er a distant tower, A star appeared that was to show the hour. The virgin saw ; and going to a room Which held an altar burning with perfume. Cut oil' a lock of her dark solid hair, And laid it, with a little w^hispered prayer. Before a statue, that of marble bright Sat smiling downwards o'er the rosy light. Then at the flame a torch of pine she lit. And o'er her head anxiously holding it. Ascended to the roof ; and leaning there, Lifted its light into the darksome air. The boy beheld — beheld it from the sea. And parted his wet locks, and breathed with glee. And rose, in swimming, more triumphantly. Smooth was the sea that night, the lover strong, And in the springy waves he danced along. He rose, he dipped his breast, he aimed, he cut With his clear arms, and from before him put The parting waves, and in and out the air His shoulders felt, and trailed his washing hair '^ MARTIAL'S EPITAPH ON EROTION. 2;^ But when he saw the torch, oh, how he sprung, And thrust his feet against the waves, and flung The foam behind, as though he scorned the sea. And parted his wet locks, and breathed with glee, And rose, and panted, most triumphantly ! Arrived at last on shallow ground, he saw The stooping light, as if in haste, withdraw : Again it issued just above the door. With a white hand, and vanished as before. Then rinsing, with a sudden-ceasing sound Of wateriness, he stood on the firm ground, And treading up a little slippery bank, With jutting myrtles mixed, and verdure dank. Came to a door ajar — all hushed, all blind With darkness ; yet he guessed who stood behind ; And entering with a turn, the breathless boy A breathless welcome finds, and words that die for joy. MARTIAL'S EPITAPH OX EROTIO:^^. (^The Indicatory November lo, 1819.) Underneath this greedy stone Lies little sweet Erotion ; Whom the Fates, with hearts as cold, Nipped away at six years old. Thou, whoever thou mayst be. That hast this small field after me, Let the yearly rites be paid To her little slender shade ; So shall no disease or jar Hurt thy house, or chill thy Lar j But this tomb here be alone, The only melancholy stone. 24 LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. CORONATION SOLILOQUY OF GEORGE THE FOURTH. (July 19, 1 82 1.) To the tune of Amo, amas, I love a lass As cedar tall and slender ; JSiceet coHslip^s grare, Is her nominative case, And she's of the feminine gender. Horum quorum, Sunt divorum, Harum, scarum, divo ; Tag rag, merri/ derrg, pcrin-ig and hatband, jlic, hoc, horum, genitivo. O'Keefe. I. Eego, regis, Good God, what's this? What, only half my Peeries ! Regas, regat, Good God, what's that ? The voice is like my deary's ! Oh, no more there ; Shut the door there ; Harum, scarum, strife, ! Bags, Bags, Sherry Derry, periwigs, and fat lads, Save us from our wife, ! II. I decline a C. Regina, Rex alone's more handsome : Oh what luck, Sir, Exit uxor ! Rursus ego a man sum. Glory, glory ! How will story Tell how I was gazed at ! Perfect from my pumps, to the plumes above my hatband, AH are me amazed at ! CORONATION SOLILOQUY OF GEORGE THE FOURTH. 25 III. Yes, my hat, Sii's, Think, of that. Sirs, Yast, and pUimed, and Spain-like : See my big, Graml robes, my wig Young, yet Hon-manc-like. Glory ! glory ! I'm not hoary; Age it can't come o'er me : Mad caps, grave caps, gazing on the grand man, All alike adore me. IV. I know where A fat, a fair, Sweet other self is doting : I'd reply With wink of eye, But fear the newsman noting. Hah ! the Toying, Never cloying, Cometh to console me : Crowns and sceptres, jewellery, state swords, — ■ Who now .^hall control me ! V. Must I walk now ! What a baulk now ! Noil est regis talis. 0, for youth now ! For in truth now, Non sum eram qualis. Well, well, roar us, On before us, Harum, flarum, stout 0, Stately, greatly, periwig and trumpets — Oh, could I hnive but ni}' gout ! VI. What a dies ! How it fri-es ! Handkerchiefs for sixty. 25 LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. Ajyprohatio ! Sibilatio ! How I feel betwixt ye ! Curlies, burlies, Dukes and earlies, Bangs and clangs of band ! Shouty, flouty, heavy rig, and gouty, When shall I come to a stand ! VII. Bliss at last ! The street is passed ; The aisle — I've dragged me through it : Oh the rare Old crowning chair ! I fear I flopped into it. Balmy, balmy, Comes the psalmy ; Bland the organ blows me ; Crown down coming on a periwig that fits me, All right royal shows me ! VIII. Oh how honoj My corona I Sitting so how dulcis ! My oculus grim, And my spectrum slim, And proud, as I hold it, my pulse is ! Shout us^ chorus ; Organs, roar us ; Bealms, let a secret start ye : — Dragon-killing George on the coin is myself, And the dragon is Bonaparte. IX. And yet alas ! Must e'en / pass Through hisses again on foot. Sirs ! Oh pang profound ! And I now walk crowned, And with sceptre in liand to boot, Sirs ! CORONATION SOLILOQUY OF GEORGE THE FOURTH. 27 I ^o, I go, With a tire in my toe, I'm bowing, blasting, baking ! Hall, Hall, ope your doors, and let your guest in j Every inch I'm a — king. X. But now M'O dine 1 Oh word divine, Beyond what e'en has crowned it ! Envy may call Great monarchs small. But feast, and jou dumb-found it. Brandy, brandy, To steady me handy For playing my knife and fork O ! Green fat, and devilry, shall warrant me ere bed-time, In drawing my twentieth cork 0. XI. Hah, my Champy ! Plumy, trampy ! Astley's best can't beat him ! See his frown ! His glove thrown down ! Should a foe appear, he'd eat him ! Glory, glory, Glut and glory — I mean poury, Glut and poury — Poury, morey. Splash and floory, Crown us, drown us, vivo J Cram dram, never end, plethora be d — ned, man Vivat Rex dead-alive O ! 2$ LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. TO A SPIDER RUNNING ACROSS A ROOM. (The Liberal, Xo. 3, 1823.) Thou poisonous rascal, running at this rate O'er the perjDlexing desert of a mat, Scrambling and scuttling on thy scratchy legs, Like a scared miser with his money-bags ; Thou thief — thou scamp — thou hideous much in little Bearing away the plunder of a spital — Caitiff of corners^ doer of dark deeds, Mere lump of poison lifted on starved threads, That, while they run, go sliuddering here and there, As if abhorring what they're forced to bear. Like an old bloated tyrant whom his slaves Bear from the gaping of a thousand graves, And take to some vile corner of a Court, Where felons of his filthy race resort — I have thee now, I have thee here, full blown, Thou lost old wretch benighted by the noon ! What dost thou say 1 What dost thou think ? Dost see Providence hanging o'er thee, to wit, me ? Dost fear ? Dost shrink, with all thine eyes to view The shadowing threat of mine avenging shoe ? Now, now it comes; — one pang — and thou wilt lie Flat as the sole that treads thy gorged impurity. MAHMOUD. {TJie Liberal, No. 4, 1823.) There came a man, making his hasty moan Before the Sultan Mahmoud on his throne, And crying out — " My sorrow is my right, And I ivill see the Sultan, and to-night." "Sorrow," said Mahmoud, "is a reverend thing I recognize its right, as king with king ; Speak on." " A fiend has got into my house," Exclaimed the staring man, " and tortures us : MAHMOUD, 29 One of thine ollicei's; — he comes, tlie ahhorred, And takes possession of my house, my board, My bed :— -1 have two daughters and a wife, And the wild villain comes, and makes me mad with life." " Is he there now ? " said Mahmoud. " No ; he left The house when 1 did, of my wits bereft ; And lausfhed me down the street, because I vowed I'd bring the prince himself to lay him in his shroud ; I'm mad with want, I'm mad with misery, And oh, thou Sultan Mahmoud, God cries out for thee ! " The Sultan comforted the man, and said, *' Go home, and I will send thee wine and bread " (For he was poor), " and other comforts. Go : And should the wretch return, let Sultan Mahmoud know." In two days' time, -svith haggard eyes and beard, And shaken voice, the suitor reappeared, And said, " He's come," — Mahmoud said not a word. But rose, and took four slaves, each with a sword, And went with the vexed man. They reach the place, And hear a voice, and see a female face, That to the window fluttered in affright. "Go in," said Mahmoud, '^and put out the light; But tell the females first to leave the room ; And when the drunkard follows them, we come." The man went in. There was a cry, and hark ! A table falls, the window is struck dark ; Forth rush the breathless women ; and behind With curses comes the fiend in desperate mind. In vain : the sabres soon cut short the strife, And chop the shrieking wretch, and drink his bloody life. " Now light the light," the Sultan cried aloud. 'Twas done; he took it in his hand, and bowed Over the corpse, and looked upon the face ; Then turned and knelt beside it in the place, And said a prayer, and from his lips there crept Some gentle words of pleasure, and he wept. 30 LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. In reverent silence the spectators wait, Then bring him at his call both wine and meat ; And when he had refreshed his noble hearty He bade his host be blest, and rose up to depart, The man amazed, all mildness now, and tears, Fell at the Sultan's feet, with many prayers, And begged him to vouchsafe to tell his slave, The reason first of that command he gave About the light ; then when he saw the face, Why he knelt down ; and lastly, how it was. That fare so poor as his detained him in the place. The Sultan said, with much humanity, ** Since first I saw thee come, and heard thy cry, I could not rid me of a dread, tho.t one By whom such daring villanies were done. Must be some lord of mine, perhaps a lawless son. Whoe'er he was, I knew my task, but feared A father's heart, in case the worst appeared. For this 1 had the light put out. But when I saw the face, and found a stranger slain, I knelt and thanked the sovereign arbiter, Whose work I had performed through pain and fear ; And then I rose, and was refreshed with food, The first time since thou cam'st, and marredst my solitude." OK KEADING POMFKET'S '' CHOICE." (1823.) I HAVE been reading Pomfret's ''Choice" this spring, A pretty kind of — sort of — kind of thing, ilTot much a verse, and poem none at all, Yet, as they say, extremely natural. And yet I know not. There's an art in pies, In raising crusts as well as galleries ; And he's the poet, more or less, who knows The charm that hallows the least truth from proso^ And dresses it in its mild singing clothes. ON READING POMFRET'S "CHOICE." 31 Not oaks alone are trees, nor roses flowers ; Much humble wealth makes rich this world of ours. Nature from some sweet energy throws up Alike the pine-mount and the buttercup ; And truth she makes so precious, that to paint Either, shall shrine an artist like a saint, And bring him in his turn the crowds that press Bound Guide's saints or Titian's goddesses. Our trivial poet hit upon a theme Which all men love, an old, sweet household dream : Pray, reader, what is yours ?— I know full well "What sort of home should grace my garden-bell. My grounds should not be large. I like to go To Nature for a range, and prospect too. And cannot fancy she'd comprise for me, Even in a park, her all-sufficiency. Besides, my thoughts fly far; and when at rest, Love, not a watch-tower, but a lulling nest. A Chiswick or a Chatsworth might, I grant, Visit my dreams with an ambitious want ; But then I should be forced to know the weight Of splendid cares, new to my former state ; And these 'twould far more fit me to admire, Borne by the graceful ease of noblest Devonshire. Such grounds, however, as I had, should look Like ''something" still; have seats, and walks, and brook ; One spot for flowers, the rest all turf and trees j For I'd not grow my own bad lettuces. I'd build a covered path too against rain, Long, peradventure, as my whole domain, And so be sure of generous exercise, The youth of age and med'cine of the wise. And this reminds me, that behind some screen About my grounds, I'd have a bowling-green ; Such as in wits' and merry women's days Suckling preferred before his w^alk of bays. You may still see them, dead as haunts of fairies, By the old seats of Killigrews and Careys, AVhere all, alas ! is vanished from the ring, Wits and black eyes, the skittles and the king 1 32 LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. Fishinfr I hate, because I tLink about it. Which makes it right that I should do without it. A dinner, or a death, might not be much, But cruelty's a rod I dare not touch. I own I cannot see my right to feel For my own jaws, and tear a trout's with steel ; To troll him here and there, and spike, and strain, And let him loose to jerk him back again. Fancy a preacher at this sort of work, Not with his trout or gudgeon, but his clerk: The clerk leaps gaping at a tempting bit, And, hah ! an ear-ache with a knife in it ! All manly games I'd play at — golf and quoits, And cricket, to set lungs and limbs to rights, And make me conscious, with a due respect, Of muscles one forgets by long neglect. With these, or bowls aforesaid, and a ride, Books, music, friends, the day would I divide, Most with my family, but when alone, Absorbed in some new poem of my own ; A task which makes my time so richly pass, So like a sunshine cast through painted glass, (Save where poor Captain Sword crashes the panes), That could my friends live too, and were the gains Of toiling men but free from sordid fears, Well could I walk this earth a thousand years. SUDDEN FINE WEATHER. {The Tatler, May 1832.) Header ! what soul that loves a verse, can see The spring return, nor glow like you and me? Hear the quick birds, and see the landscape fill, Nor long to utter his melodious will ? This more than ever leaps into the veins When spring has been delayed by winds and rains. SUDDEN FINE WEATHER. 33 And coming with a burst, comes like a .show, Bhie all above, and basking green below, And all the people cnlling the svveet prime : Then issues forth the bee to clutch the thyme, And the bee poet rushes into rhyme. For lo I no sooner has the cold withdrawn, Tlian tlie bright elm is tufted on the lawn; The merry sap has run up in the bowers, And bursts the windows of the buds in flowers ; With song the bosoms of the birds run o'er. The cuckoo calls, the swallow's at the door, And apple-trees at noon, with bees alive, Burn with the golden chorus of the hive. Now all these sweets, these sounds, this vernal blaze. Is but one joy, expressed a thousand ways : And honey from the flowers, and song from birds, Are from the poet's pen his overflowing words. Ah, friends ! methiidcs it were a pleasant sphere, If, like the trees, we blossomed every year ; If locks grew thick again, and rosy dyes lleturned in cheeks, and raciness in eyes, And all around ns, vital to the tips, The human orchard laughed with cherry lips ! Lord ! what a burst of merriment and ]Aay, Fair dames, were that ! and what a tirst of May ! So natural is the wish, that bards gone by Have left it, all, in some immortal sigh i And yet the winter months M'ere not so well : Who would like changing, as the seasons fell ? Fade every year ; and stare, 'midst ghastly friends, With falling hairs, and stuck-out fingers' ends? Besides, this tale of youth that comes again, Is no more true of apple-trees than men. Ye wits and bards then, pray discern your duty, And learn the lastingness of human beauty. Your finest fruit to some two months may reach : I've known a cheek at forty like a peach. D 34 LEIGH HUKT'S POEMS. But see ! the weather calls me. Here's a bee Comes boiuiclmg in my room imperiously, And talking to himself, hastily burns About mine ear, and so in heat returns. little brethren of the fervid soul, Kissers of flowers, lords of the golden bowl, 1 follow to your fields and tufted brooks : Winter's the time to which the poet looks For hiving his sweet thoughts, and making honied books. SONG OF FAIRIES ROBBING AN ORCHARD. (1832.) We the Fairies, blithe and antic, Of dimensions not gigantic, Though the moonshine mostly keep us, Oft in orchards frisk and peep us. Stolen sweets are always sweeter, Stolen kisses much completer. Stolen looks are nice in chapels, Stolen, stolen be your apples. When to bed the world are bobbing, Then's the time for orchard robbing ; Yet the fruit were scarce worth peeling Were it not for stealing, stealing. PAGANINI. (Leigh Ilurifs London Journal, April 16, 1834.) So played of late to every passing thought With finest change (might I but half as well So write !) the pale magician of the bow, Who brought from Italy the tales, made true, Of Grecian lyres ; and on his sphery hand, tAGANINI. 3^ Loading the air with dumb expectancy, fcjuspended, ere it fell, a nation's breath. He smote — and clinging to the serious chords With godlike ravishment, drew forth a breath, So deep, so strong, so fervid thick with love, Blissful, yet laden as with twenty prayers, That Juno yearned with no diviner soul To the first burthen of the lips of Jove. The exceeding mystery of the loveliness Saddened delight; and with his mournful look, Dreary and gaunt, hanging his pallid face 'Twixt his dark flowing locks, he almost seeme.l. To feeble or to melancholy eyes. One that had parted with his soul for pride. And in the sable secret lived forlorn. But true and earnest, all too happily That skill dwelt in him, serious with its joy ; For noble now he smote the exultinof strino-s. And bade them march before his stately w^ill ; And now he loved them like a cheek, and laid Endearment on them , and took pity sweet ; And now he was all mirth, or all for sense And reason, carving out his thoughts like prose After his poetry ; or else he laid His ow^n soul prostrate at the feet of love. And with a full and trembling fervour deep, In kneeling and close-creeping urgency. Implored some mistress with hot tears ; which past, And after patience had brought right of peace. He drew, as if from thoughts finer than hope, Comfort around him in ear-soothing strains And elegant composure ; or he turned To heaven instead of earth, and raised a prayer So earnest vehement, yet so lowly sad, Mighty with want and all poor human tears, That never saint, wrestling with earthly love And in mid-age unable to get free, Tore down from heaven such pity. Or behold, In his despair (for such, from what he spoke Of grief before it, or of love, 'twould seem), 36 LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. Jump would he into some strange wail uncouth Of witches' dance, ghastly with whinings thin And palsied nods — mirth wicked, sad, and weak, And then with show of skill mechanical, Marvellous as witchcraft, he would overthrow That vision with a shower of notes like hail, Or sudden mixtures of all difficult things Never yet heard ; flashing the sharp tones now, In downward leaps like swords ; now rising fine Into some utmost tip of minute sound, From whence he stepped into a higher and higher On viewless points, till laugh took leave of him : Or he would fly as if fi'oni all the world To be alone and happy, and you should hear His instrument become a tiee far off, A nest of birds and sunbeams, sparkling both, A cottage bower : or he would condescend. In playful wisdom which knows no contempt. To bring to laughing memory, plain as sight, A farmyard with its inmates, ox and lamb. The whistle and the whip, with feeding hens In household fidget muttering evermore. And, rising as in scorn, crowned Chanticleer, Ordaining silence with his sovereign crow. Then from one chord of his amazing shell "Would he fetch out the voice of choirs, and weight Of the built organ ; or some twofold strain Moving before him in sweet-going yoke. Ride like an Eastern conquei-or, round whose state Some light Morisco leaps with his guitar ; And ever and anon o'er these he'd throw Jets of small notes like pearl, or like the pelt Of lovers' sweetmeats on Italian lutes From windows on a feast-day, or the leaps Of pebbled water, sprinkled in the sun, One choixl effecting all : — and when the ear Felt thei-e was nothing present but himself And silence, and the wonder drew deep sighs, Then would his bow lie down again in tears. And speak to some one in a prayer of love. Endless, and never from his heart to go : Or he would talk as of some secret bliss, CAPTAIN SWORD AND CAPTAIN PEN. 37 And at the close of all the wonderment (Which himself shared) near and more near would come Into the inmost ear, and wliisper there Breathings so soft, so low, so full of life, Touched beyond sense, and only to be borne By pauses which made each less bearable, That out of pure necessity for relief From that heaped joy, and bliss that laughed for pain, The thunder of the uprolling house came down, And bowed the breathing sorcerer into smiles. CAPTAIN SWOIID AND CAPTAIN PEN. (1835-) THE BATTLE-FIELD AT NIGHT 'Tis a wild night out of doors ; The wind is mad upon the moors, And comes into the rocking town, Stabbing all things, up and down, And then there is a weeping rain Huddling 'gainst the window-pane And good men bless themselves in bed; The mother brings her infant's head Closer, with a joy like tears. And thinks of angels in her prayers ; Then sleeps, with his small hand in hers. Two loving women, lingering yet Ere the fire is out, are met. Talking sweetly, time-beguiled. One of her bridegroom, one her child, The bridegroom he. They have received Happy letters, more believed For public news, and feel the bliss The heavenlier on a night like this. They think him housed, they think him blcct, Curtained in the core of rest, Danger distant, all good near; Why hath their " Good-night " a t<^ar ] <58 LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. Behold him ! By a ditch he Hes Ckitching the wet earth, his eyes Beginning to be mad. In vain His tongue still thirsts to lick the rain, That mocked but now his homeward tears ; And ever and anon he rears His legs and knees with all their strength, And then as strongly thrusts at length. Baisedj or stretched, he cannot bear The wound that girds him, weltering there : And " Water ! " he cries with moonward stare. His nails are in earth, his eyes in air, And ''Water !" he crieth — he may not forbear. Brave and good was he, yet now he dreams The moon looks cruel ; and he blasphemes. '' Water ! water !" all over the field : To nothing but Death will that wound-voice yield. One, as he crieth, is sitting half bent; What holds he so close 1 — his body is rent. Another is mouthless, with eyes on cheek ; Unto the raven he may not speak. One would fain kill him ; and one half round The place wdiere he writhes, hath up-beaten the ground. Like a mad horse hath he beaten the ground, And the feathers and music that litter it round. The gore, and the mud, and the golden sound. Come hither, ye cities ! ye ball-rooms, take breath ! See what a floor hath the Dance of Death ! A shriek ! — Great God ! what superhuman Peal was that 1 Not man, nor woman, Nor twenty madmen, crushed, could wreak Their soul in such a ponderous shriek. Dumbly, for an instant, stares The field ; and creep men's dying hairs. O friend of man ! O noble creature ! Patient and brave, and mild by nature, Mild by nature, and mute as mild, Why brings he to these passes wild, THE GLOVE AND THE LIONS. 39 Thee, gentle horse, thou sliape of beauty? Could he not do his dreadful duty (If duty it be, which seems mad folly), Nor link thee to his melancholy ? Two noble steeds lay side by side, One cropped the meek grass ere it died ; Pang-struck it struck t'other, already torn. And out of its bowels that shriek Avas born. Sneereth the trumpet, and stampeth the drum, And again Captain Sword in his pride doth come ; He passeth the fields where his friends lie lorn, Feeding the flowers and the feeding corn, Where under the sunshine cold they lie. And he hasteth a tear from his old grey eye. Small thinking is his but of work to be done, And onward he marcheth, using the sun : He wslayeth, he wastetli, he spouteth his fires On babes at the bosom, and bed-rid sires ; He bursteth pale cities, through smoke and through yelL And bringeth behind him, hot-blooded, his hell. Tlien the weak door is barred and the soul all sore, And hand-wringing helplessness paceth the floor, And the lover is slain, and the parents are nigh Oh God ! let me breathe, and look up at thy sky ! Good is as hundreds, evil as one ; Kound about goeth the golden sun. THE GLOYE AND THE LIONS. {The New Blontldy Magazine, May 1836.) King Francis was a hearty king, and loved a royal sport, And one day as his lions fought, sat looking on the court ; The nobles filled the benches, with the ladies in their pride, And 'mongst them sat the Count de Lorge, with one for whom he sighed : 40 LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. And truly 'twas a gallant thing to see that crowning show, ■ Valoiu- and love, and a king above, and the royal beasts below. Eamped and roared the lions, with horrid laughing jaws ; They bit, they glared^ gave blows like beams, a wind went with their paws ; AVith wallowing might and stifled roar they rolled on one another, Till ail the pit v/ith sand and mane was in a thunderous smother ; The bloody foam above the bars came whisking through the air; Said Francis then, ^' Faith, gentlemen, we're better here than there." De Lorge's love o'erheard the King, a beauteous lively dame With smiling lips and sharp bright eyes, which always seemed the same ; She thought, the Count my lover is brave as brave can be ; He surely would do wondrous things to show^ his love of me; King, ladies, lovers, all look on ; the occasion is divine ; I'll drop my glove, to prove his love; great glory will be mine. She dropped her glove, to prove his love, then looked at him and smiled ; He bowed, and in a moment leaped among the lions wild : The leap was quick, return was quick, he has regained his place, 'Then threw the glove, but not with love, right in the lady's face. "By Heaven I" said Francis, ''rightly done!" and he rose from where he sat : *' No love," quoth he, " but vanity, sots love a task like that." SONGS OF THE FLOWERS. 41 SONGS OF THE FLOWERS. {2'he New 31o)i(Iili/ Mof/azine, May 1S36.) ROSES. We fire blushing Koses, Bending with our fulness, '3Ii(lst our close-capped sister buds, Warming the green coolness. Whatsoe'er of beauty Yearns and yet reposes, Blush, and bosom, and sweet breath, Took a shape in roses. Hold one of us lightly — See from what a slender Stalk we bower in heavy blooms, And roundness rich and tender. Know you not our only Bival flower — the human ? Loveliest weight on lightest foot, Joy- abundant woman ? LILIES. We are Lilies fair. The flower of virgin light ; Nature held us forth, and said, " Lo ! my thoughts of white. '' Ever since then, angels Hold us in their hands ; You may see them where they take In pictures their sweet stands. Like the gaiden's angels Also do we seem. And not the less for being crowned With a golden dream. LEIGH HUNT'S POEMS. Could you see around us The enamoured air, You would see it pale with bliss To hold a thing so fair. VIOLETS. We are violets blue, For our sweetness found Careless in the mossy shades Looking on the ground. Love's dropped eyelids and a kiss — Such our breath an