HUNT AS ESSAYIST.

145

better; and these he dealt out-wave upon

wave

on all sorts of unimportant themes. Thus, he writes upon "Sticks"; and again upon "Maid-servants"; again on "Bees and Butterflies" (which is indeed very pretty); and again "Upon getting up of a cold morning"-in which he compassionates those who are haled out of their beds by "harpy-footed furies"-discourses on his own experience and sees his own breath rolling forth like smoke from a chimney, and the windows frosted over.

"Then the servant comes in: 'It is very cold this morning, is it not?' 'Very cold, sir.' 'Very cold, indeed, isn't it?' 'Very cold, indeed, sir.' 'More than usually so, isn't it, even for this weather?' 'Why, sir, I think it is, sir.' And then the hot water comes: And is it quite

་

hot? And isn't it too hot?' And what an unnecessary and villainous custom this is of shaving.'

Whereupon he glides off, in words that flow as easily as water from a roof-into a disquisition upon flowing beards - instancing Cardinal Bembo and Michelangelo, Plato and the Turks. Listen again to what he has to say in his Indicator upon "A Coach":—

"It is full of cushions and comfort; elegantly colored inside and out; rich yet neat; light and rapid, yet substantial. The horses seem proud to draw it. The fat and fair-wigged coachman lends his sounding lash, his arm only in action, and that but little; his body well set with its own weight. The footman, in the pride of his nonchalance, holding by the straps behind, and glancing down sideways betwixt his cocked hat and neckcloth, standing swinging from East to West upon his springy toes. The horses rush along amidst their glancing harness. Spotted dogs leap about them, barking with a princely superfluity of noise. The hammer cloth trembles through all its fringe. The paint flashes in the sun."

Nothing can be finer - if one likes that sort of fineness. We follow such a writer with no sense of his having addressed our intellectual nature, but rather with a sense of pleasurable regalement to our nostrils by some high wordy perfume.

Hawthorne, in Our Old Home, I think, tells us that even to extreme age, the boyishness of the man's nature shone through and made Hunt's speech like the chirp of a bird; he never tired of gathering his pretty roses of words. It is hard to think of such a man doing serious service in the rôle of radical journalist as if he could speak

dangerous things! And yet, who can tell? They

HUNT'S VERSE.

147

say Robespierre delighted in satin facings to his coat, and was never without his boutonnière.

We all know the figure of Harold Skimpole, in Dickens's Bleak House, with traits so true to Leigh Hunt's, that the latter's friends held up a warning finger, and said: "For shame!" to the novelist. Indeed, I think Dickens felt relentings in his later years, and would have retouched the portrait; but a man who paints with flesh and blood pigments cannot retouch.

Certain it is that the household of Hunt was of a ram-shackle sort, and he and his always very much out at ends. Even Carlyle, who was a neighbor at Chelsea, was taken aback at the easy way in which Hunt confronted the butcher-andbaker side of life; and the kindly Mrs. Carlyle drops a half-querulous mention of her shortened larder and the periodic borrowings of the excellent Mrs. Hunt.

Hunt's Verse.

But over all this we stretch a veil now, woven out of the little poems that he has left. He wrote no great poems, to be sure; for here, as in

his prose, he is earnestly bent on carving little baskets out of cherry-stones-little figures on cherry-stones-dainty hieroglyphics, but always on cherry-stones!

His "Rimini," embodying that old Dantesque story about Giovanni and Paolo and Francesca, is his longest poem. There are exceedingly pretty and delicate passages in it; I quote one or two :

"For leafy was the road with tall array
On either side of mulberry and bay,
And distant snatches of blue hills between;
And there the alder was, with its bright green,
And the broad chestnut, and the poplar's shoot
That, like a feather, waves from head to foot;
With ever and anon majestic pines;

And still, from tree to tree, the early vines
Hung, garlanding the way in amber lines.

And then perhaps you entered upon shades,
Pillowed with dells and uplands 'twixt the glades
Through which the distant palace, now and then,
Looked forth with many windowed ken-
A land of trees which, reaching round about,
In shady blessing stretched their old arms out
With spots of sunny opening, and with nooks
To lie and read in- sloping into brooks,
Where at her drink you started the slim deer,
Retreating lightly with a lovely fear.

HUNT'S FRANCESCA.

And all about the birds kept leafy house,

And sung and sparkled in and out the boughs,

And all about a lovely sky of blue

Clearly was felt, or down the leaves laughed through."

And so on

149

executed with ever so much of delicacy-but not a sign or a symbol of the grave and melancholy tone which should equip, even to the utmost hem of its descriptive passages, that tragic story of Dante.

Those deft, little feathery touches-about deer, and birds, and leafy houses, are not scored with the seriousness which in every line and pause should be married with the intensity of the story. The painting of Mr. Watts, of the dead Francesca ghastly though it be has more in it to float one out into the awful current of Dante's story than a world of the happy wordy meshes of Mr. Hunt. A greater master would have brought in, maybe, all those natural beauties of the landscape-the woods, the fountains, the clear heaven but they would all have been toned down to the low, tragic movement, which threatand creeps on and on, and which dims even the blue sky with forecast of its controlling gloom.

ens,