[35] Correspondence, I, p. 179.
[36] The Reflector, I, p. 5.
[37] Monkhouse, Life of Leigh Hunt, p. 79.
[38] Patmore, My Friends and Acquaintance, III, p. 101.
[39] The Edinburgh Review of May, 1823, in an article entitled The Periodical Press ranked Hunt next to Cobbett in talent and The Examiner as the ablest and most respectable of weekly publications, when allowance had been made for the occasional twaddle and flippancy, the mawkishness about firesides and Bonaparte, and the sickly sonnet-writing.
[40] Mazzini wrote Hunt: “Your name is known to many of my Countrymen; it would no doubt impart an additional value to the thoughts embodied in the League. [International League.] It is the name not only of a patriot, but of a high literary man and a poet. It would show at once that natural questions are questions not of merely political tendencies, but of feeling, eternal trust, and Godlike poetry. It would show that poets understand their active mission down here, and that they are also prophets and apostles of things to come. I was told only to-day that you had been asked to be a member of the League’s Council, and feel a want to express the joy I too would feel at your assent.” (Cornhill Magazine, LXV, p. 480 ff.)
[41] The Reflector, I, p. 5.
[42] Hunt accepted the Monthly Repository in 1837 as a gift from W. J. Fox in order to free it from Unitarian influence. Carlyle, Landor, Browning and Miss Martineau were contributors.
[43] (1) “Besides, it is my firm belief—as firm as the absence of positive, tangible proof can let it be (and if we had that, we should all kill ourselves, like Plato’s scholars, and go and enjoy heaven at once), that whatsoever of just and affectionate the mind of man is made by nature to desire, is made by her to be realized, and that this is the special good, beauty and glory of that illimitable thing called space—in her there is room for everything.” Correspondence, II, p. 57.
(2) And Faith, some day, will all in love be shown. (“Abraham and the Fire-Worshipper,” Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, 1857, p. 135.)