Sweet Hampstead and Its Associations

by Caroline A. White

Charles Lamb.

One looks regretfully back to the breaking up of the little literary home in the Vale of Health—the roof under which Hunt tells us that he had introduced Shelley to the young poet Keats; that had welcomed the handsome, brown-faced Charles Lamb, and his always-to-be-pitied sister Mary; where the genial C. Cowden Clarke came and went as he listed, bursting in like a mingling of breeze and sunshine, full of freshness and warmth; and Keats, keenly sensitive and self-contained, who, loving his old schoolmaster’s son, to whom he owed deep obligations—the ‘first to teach him all the sweets of song’—yet thought the laughter-loving Clarke, in spite of his poetical taste, ‘coarse.’ One would fain have kept them a little longer dwellers in ‘sweet Hampstead.’

First Shelley sails away for Dante’s land, whither Hunt and Keats were eventually to follow him—the first to join Lord Byron in a literary enterprise that did not answer its noble projector’s expectations,’[192] and Keats in the companionship and care of his devoted friend, the young and promising artist Severn, with the vain hope of lengthening the thinning thread of life that bound him to earth. Throughout these years of failing health and mental trial Keats was suffering the sordid cares of insufficient means—cares that to an independent, upright spirit such as his, must have been an ever-present source of uneasiness and depression. The critics’ half-hearted verdict on ‘Endymion,’ when, as in the case of some of his reviewers, it was not cruel, must have deeply wounded the sensitive nature of the poet, who had yet the manliness to hide his wounds, and the faith in himself to fall back on the consolation of his own conviction of the vitality of his work. It stirs one with a feeling of indignation, remembering the depreciation of the poem in the poet’s lifetime, to read that at a sale of autographs in the September of the year 1897 the original manuscript of John Keats’ ‘Endymion’ sold for £695.

It has been told me by one who knew Leigh Hunt long subsequent to his return from Italy, that no one who came within the charm of his kindly nature and delightful fancy could refrain from loving him. He was full of friendliness and human sympathy, and ready to render kindness to all who needed it, virtues that made men overlook other short-comings in his character—his vanity and want of a proper feeling of self-dependence: he was too apt to throw himself and his difficulties upon his friends. Mrs. Barbauld could see no beauty in his ‘Rimini’; it is, according to her ideas, ‘most fantastic’; she was without the power of feeling the natural simplicity and picturesqueness of Hunt; to her he was an author, who, ‘in exaggeration of all the slovenliness of the new school, has thought proper to come into public with his neckcloth untied and his stockings about his heels.’ She could not comprehend his originality, or the half-antiquated but expressive phraseology that gave such piquancy to his prose writings, and has made his Essays, as a recent writer has observed, worthy to have a place on the same shelf with those of ‘Elia.’

Long after Leigh Hunt had vacated the little cottage in the Vale of Health another charming reminiscence attaches to the locality.

Leigh Hunt.

Lord Dufferin, in his delightful memoir of his lovely and talented mother, Helen, Lady Dufferin (then Mrs. Blackwood), the writer of many sweet lyrics, tells us that she tenanted one of those toy cottages in the Vale of Health,[193] Hampstead, where she sought health, and found it—so much so that the next summer she took a larger cottage in the same neighbourhood, probably Pavilion Cottage, a rather odd association, which Mr. Baines mentions as having been her ladyship’s abode at one time. He does not name her having lived in one of the smaller cottages previously.

Some time between 1855-60 the Lovells removed from their house in Mornington Crescent, where they had been the near neighbours of George Cruikshank, the Westland Marstons, Mrs. Oliphant, and many other literary and artistic friends, to Vale Lodge, in the Vale of Health, which, as I have elsewhere said, they fully believed to have been the Hampstead home of Leigh Hunt—a representation that, perhaps, the agent, or some other interested person, found useful in letting the house. Though of very modest proportions, it by no means tallied with Leigh Hunt’s description of his ‘little packing-case,’ nor did the parlours (there were more than one) resemble an old mansion’s closets, which the single one in the toy cottage did very closely. Mr. Lovell’s residence here was not a very long one, and the family subsequently removed to Lyndhurst Road.