Single phrases showing the influence of Hunt[178] are: “airy feel,” “patting the flowing hair,” “A Man of elegance,” “sweet-lipped ladies,” “grateful the incense,” “modest pride,” “a sun-beamy tale of a wreath,” “soft humanity,” “leafy luxury,” “pillowy silkiness,” “swelling apples,” “the very pleasant rout,” “forms of elegance.”
The following passages apparently bear as close a resemblance to each other as it is possible to find by the comparison of individual passages from the works of the two men:
“The sidelong view of swelling leafiness
Which the glad setting sun in gold doth dress”[179]
compare with:
“And every hill, in passing one by one
Gleamed out with twinkles of the golden sun:
For leafy was the road, with tall array.”[180]
The Epistles are strikingly like Hunt’s epistles in spirit, diction and metre. Mr. Colvin has pointed out that the one addressed To George Felton Mathew was written in November, 1815, before Keats had met Hunt and before the publication of the latter’s epistles;[181] but Keats may have known them at the time in manuscript through Clarke. The resemblances may also have been due, in part, as in other points of comparison, to an innate similarity of thought and feeling.
That Hunt’s habit of sonneteering and his preference for the Petrarcan form influenced Keats, is attested by the similarity of the latter’s sonnets to Hunt’s in form, subjects, and allusions, and by the direct references[182] to Hunt. On the Grasshopper and the Cricket[183] and To the Nile[184] were written in contest with Hunt. To Spenser is a refusal to comply with Hunt’s request that he should write a sonnet on Spenser.[185] The title of On Leigh Hunt’s Poem, The Story of Rimini[186] speaks for itself.[187]
To put it briefly, the Poems of 1817 show Hunt’s influence in more ways than any equal number of the young poet’s later verses. It is seen in Keats’s subject matter[188] and allusions; in his adoption of a colloquial style and diction; in his absorption of Hunt’s spirit in the treatment of nature and in his attitude toward women; and in his imitation and exaggerated use of the free heroic couplet in Sleep and Poetry, I stood tiptoe, Specimen of an Induction and other poems.
Of the poem Lines on seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair, written in January, 1818, Keats wrote in a letter to Bailey: “I was at Hunt’s the other day, and he surprised me with a real authenticated lock of Milton’s hair. I know you would like what I wrote thereon, so here it is—as they say of a Sheep in a Nursery Book.... This I did at Hunt’s, at his request—perhaps I should have done something better alone and at home.”[189] Leigh Hunt’s three sonnets on the same subject, published in Foliage, have been already spoken of in the preceding chapter.
Endymion shows a decided decrease in the ascendancy of Hunt’s mind over Keats, for the sway of his intellectual supremacy had been shaken before suspicions arose in Keats’s mind as to the disinterestedness of his motives. What influence lingers is seen in the general theory of versification and in the diction, with some trace in matters of taste. A marvellous luxury of imagery, glimpses into the heights and depths of nature, an absorbing love of Greek fable, a deeper infusion of the ideal have superseded what Mr. Colvin has called the “sentimental chirp” of Hunt.[190] Specific passages in Endymion reminiscent of Hunt are rare, but Book III, ll. 23-30 recalls the general descriptive style in the Descent of Liberty and summarizes in a few lines pages of Hunt’s diffuse, spectacular imagery. Once or twice Keats seems to have fallen into the colloquial manner in dialogue: