Nothing can be finer—if one likes that sort of fineness. We follow such a writer with no sense of his having addressed our intellectual nature, but rather with a sense of pleasurable regalement to our nostrils by some high wordy perfume.
Hawthorne, in Our Old Home, I think, tells us that even to extreme age, the boyishness of the man’s nature shone through and made Hunt’s speech like the chirp of a bird; he never tired of gathering his pretty roses of words. It is hard to think of such a man doing serious service in the role of radical journalist—as if he could speak dangerous things! And yet, who can tell? They say Robespierre delighted in satin facings to his coat, and was never without his boutonnière.
We all know the figure of Harold Skimpole, in Dickens’s Bleak House, with traits so true to Leigh Hunt’s, that the latter’s friends held up a warning finger, and said: “For shame!” to the novelist. Indeed, I think Dickens felt relentings in his later years, and would have retouched the portrait; but a man who paints with flesh and blood pigments cannot retouch.
Certain it is that the household of Hunt was of a ram-shackle sort, and he and his always very much out at ends. Even Carlyle, who was a neighbor at Chelsea, was taken aback at the easy way in which Hunt confronted the butcher-and-baker side of life; and the kindly Mrs. Carlyle drops a half-querulous mention of her shortened larder and the periodic borrowings of the excellent Mrs. Hunt.
Hunt’s Verse.
But over all this we stretch a veil now, woven out of the little poems that he has left. He wrote no great poems, to be sure; for here, as in his prose, he is earnestly bent on carving little baskets out of cherry-stones—little figures on cherry-stones—dainty hieroglyphics, but always on cherry-stones!
His “Rimini,” embodying that old Dantesque story about Giovanni and Paolo and Francesca, is his longest poem. There are exceedingly pretty and delicate passages in it; I quote one or two:
“For leafy was the road with tall array
On either side of mulberry and bay,
And distant snatches of blue hills between;