“But a poor Naiad, I guess not. Farewell!
I have a ditty for my hollow cell.”[191]
Again:
“I own
This may sound strangely: but when, dearest girl,
Thou seest it for my happiness, no pearl
Will trespass down those cheeks. Companion fair!
Wilt be content to dwell with her, to share
This sister’s love with me? Like one resign’d
And bent by circumstance, and thereby blind
In self-commitment, thus that meek unknown:
‘Aye, but a buzzing by my ears has flown,
Of jubilee to Dian:—truth I heard?
Well then, I see there is no little bird.’”[192]
Occasionally there are passages in the bad taste of Hunt, as this example:
“Enchantress! tell me by this soft embrace,
By the most soft completion of thy face,
Those lips, O slippery blisses, twinkling eyes,
And by these tenderest, milky sovereignties—
These tenderest, and by the nectar wine,
The passion—”[193]
Likewise:
“O that I
Were rippling round her dainty fairness now,
Circling about her waist, and striving how
To entice her to a dive! then stealing in
Between her luscious lips and eyelids thin.”[194]
In July, 1820, appeared the volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and other Poems. The lingering influence of Hunt is seen in a fondness for the short poetic tale, in the direct and simple narrative style, and in the return in Lamia to the use of the heroic couplet; but that, along with the other poems of the volume, is free from the Huntian eccentricities of manner and diction found in Keats’s earlier works. He had come into his own. In treatment, Lamia is almost faultless in technique and in matters of taste; although Mr. Colvin has pointed out as an exception the first fifteen lines of the second book, which he says have Leigh Hunt’s “affected ease and fireside triviality.”[195] One of the few occurrences of Hunt’s manner is seen in the Eve of St. Agnes.
“Paining with eloquence her balmy side.”[196]
The famous passage in the Eve of St. Agnes describing all manner of luscious edibles is very suggestive of one in Hunt’s Bacchus and Ariadne which enumerates articles of the same kind.[197] It is in this latter poem and in the Story of Rimini that Hunt’s power of description most nearly approximates to that of Keats. In 1831, in the Gentle Armour, Hunt is the imitator of Keats, as Mr. Colvin has already pointed out.[198]