‘For I am brimful of the friendliness
That in a little cottage I have found!’[186]
Whilst Shelley, writing from Italy, tells how Mrs. Williams’ singing of ‘Dorme l’amour’ transports him back to the little parlour at Hampstead. ‘I can see the piano, the prints, the casts, and hear Mary’s [Mrs. Hunt] “Ah! ah! ah!”’ Whenever Leigh Hunt or his friends refer to the Vale of Health cottage, the smallness of the place is, as it were, insisted on, and accentuated by the diminutive ‘little.’
Shelley.
With such evidence as this as to the size and position of the poet’s habitation, it appears a work of superfluity to seek after the site of a dwelling that has never existed except in the generous imagination of those who think talent receives honour from exterior surroundings to which it never made pretence. Leigh Hunt in his pretty little Vale of Health cottage (which, by the way, appears to have been as largely receptive as the kindly heart of its proprietor) was as interesting, as regarded, and as much sought by his friends—and what a cluster of bright names they make!—as if he had inhabited a mansion. The same refined taste that had given grace to his prison room reigned here, and we may depend the roses were not wanting in the little garden-plot that had given living, as well as pictured, beauty to those gloomy walls.[187]
W. Hazlitt.
Here the magnetism of its master, whose personality was even more fascinating than his writings,[188] drew around him a society of the most intellectual and clever men of the day—Hazlitt and Haydon, Telford, Ollier, Charles Cowden Clarke, Charles Lamb, Shelley, the brothers Horace and James Smith, Keats, and many others. Leigh Hunt himself was not only a brilliant talker, but an accomplished musician; he sang and played delightfully, and amongst his friends and frequent guests were the Novellos, a family to which England is much indebted for the growth and appreciation of good music. No wonder, therefore, that Keats should sing: