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.
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—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 threatens, and creeps on and on, and which dims even the blue sky with forecast of its controlling gloom.
There is no such inaptness or inadequacy where Leigh Hunt writes of crickets and grasshoppers and musical boxes. In his version of the old classic story of “Hero and Leander,” however, the impertinence (if I may be pardoned the language) of his dainty wordy dexterities is even more strikingly apparent. His Hero, waiting for her Leander, beside the Hellespont,
“Tries some work, forgets it, and thinks on,
Wishing with perfect love the time were gone,
And lost to the green trees with their sweet singers,
Taps on the casement-ledge with idle fingers.”
No—this is not a Greek maiden listening for the surge of the water before the stalwart swimmer of Abydos; it is a London girl, whom the poet has seen in a second-story back window, meditating what color she shall put to the trimming of her Sunday gown!
Far better and more beautiful is this fathoming of the very souls of the flowers:
“We are the sweet Flowers,
Born of sunny showers,
Think, whene’er you see us, what our beauty saith:
Utterance mute and bright,
Of some unknown delight,
We feel the air with pleasure, by our simple breath;
All who see us, love us;
We befit all places;
Unto sorrow we give smiles; and unto graces, graces.
“Mark our ways—how noiseless
All, and sweetly voiceless,
Though the March winds pipe to make our passage clear;
Not a whisper tells
Where our small seed dwells,
Nor is known the moment green, when our tips appear.
We tread the earth in silence,
In silence build our bowers,
And leaf by leaf in silence show, ’till we laugh atop, sweet Flowers!
…
“Who shall say that flowers
Dress not Heaven’s own bowers?
Who its love, without them, can fancy—or sweet floor?
Who shall even dare
To say we sprang not there,
And came not down that Love might bring one piece of heav’n the more?
Oh, pray believe that angels
From those blue Dominions
Brought us in their white laps down, ’twixt their golden pinions.”
No poet of this—or many a generation past—has said a sweeter or more haunting word for the flowers.
We will not forget the “Abou-ben-Adhem;” nor shall its commonness forbid our setting this charmingly treated Oriental fable, at the end of our mention of Hunt—a memorial banderole of verse:—
“Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich and like a lily in bloom,
An Angel, writing in a book of gold.
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold;
And to the presence in the room, he said,—
‘What writest thou?’ The Vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord
Answered, ‘The names of those who love the Lord.’
‘And is mine one?’ said Abou. ‘Nay, not so;’
Replied the Angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still; and said, ‘I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.’
The Angel wrote and vanished. The next night
It came again, with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And lo!—Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest!”