O, could I walk round the earth
With a heart to share my mirth,
With a look to love me ever,
Thoughtful much, but sullen never,
I could be content to see
June and no variety;
Loitering here, and living there,
With a book, and frugal fare,
With a finer gipsy time,
And a cuckoo in the clime,
Work at morn, and mirth at noon,
And sleep beneath the sacred moon.
In one of the items in his pleasant book, Table-Talk, Hunt speaks for greater cheerfulness in English literature. He cites Suckling’s famous A Ballad Upon a Wedding, in which allusion is made to the once popular belief that the sun danced on Easter-day:
Her feet beneath her petticoat,
Like little mice, stole in and out,
As if they fear’d the light;
But, Oh! She dances such a way,
No sun upon an Easter-day
Is half so fine a sight.
And then he remarks that it is a pity that we do not have, if not more such beliefs, yet more such poetry, to stand us instead of them. “Our poetry,” he writes, “like ourselves, has too little animal spirits. It has plenty of thought and imagination; plenty of night-thoughts, and day-thoughts too; and in its dramatic circle, a world of action and character. It is a poetry of the highest order and the greatest abundance. But though not sombre—though manly, hearty, and even luxuriant—it is certainly not a very joyous poetry. And the same may be said of our literature in general. You do not conceive the writers to have been cheerful men. They often recommend cheerfulness, but rather as a good and sensible practice than as something which they feel themselves.” A little later he says, “I am only speaking of the rarity of a certain kind of sunshine in our literature, and expressing a natural rainy-day wish that we had a little more of it.” He thinks there should be a joyous set of elegant extracts in a score of volumes, “that we could have at hand, like a cellaret of good wine, against April or November weather!”
Hunt believed in a “cheerful religion.” “We are for making the most of the present world,” he wrote. He had not any gloomy forebodings as to the things that may come after death. His London Journal, as Frank Carr so well states, “breathed such uniform gladness and hopefulness that every page is pervaded with an odor of homely sanctity, as of hidden violets.”
And again: He “noticed the flowers when their timorous splendours peeped through the snow at the first impulse of life in the dark earth, and when, afterwards, as a mantle they spread their glory over garden and field; greeted the birds, from the lark’s early carol, and the arrival of the swallows, until the woods became vocal with multitudinous voices.”
As to Hunt’s religion, by the way, there has been much discussion. I have Leigh Hunt’s copy of a volume bearing this long title: “The Mystical Initiations; or, Hymns of Orpheus, translated from the original Greek: with a preliminary dissertation on the Life and Theology of Orpheus,” containing this observation in Hunt’s hand-writing:
Mr. Taylor’s faith sometimes makes him eloquent; but if he had united, with his Platonical abstractions, the true Christian power of socially working at all times, he need not have feared whatever seemed coming. Platonism and Christianity, if either be thoroughly understood, are formed admirably to go together. The first shapes the human being to beauty and imagination, the latter to love and immortality. The first perfects him individually, the latter to endless companionship. Platonism lifts the philosopher towards heaven: Christianity takes up the whole human race, and puts them there.
I should like to be a worshiper in a Christian temple, in which whatsoever is good and beautiful should be held, for those reasons, to be divinely true; in which Plato’s unmalignant evil should be the ground for Christ’s all-benevolent good to stand upon; and in which no more limits should be assigned to whatever was sincere, loving, and imaginative, than to that boundless and beautiful sky, which is surely large enough to hold it.
In these days when so many feel forebodings of trouble it is pleasant to recall that two such men as Robert Louis Stevenson and Leigh Hunt, each of whom had reason for gloomy thoughts, persisted in looking upon the bright things of life. Not anywhere in the writings of these two men will one find them dwelling on their miseries. Per contra, both preached cheerfulness. In darkest hours they saw the sunshine and the flowers. Like our own Lincoln, they plucked the thistle and planted the flower where they thought the flower would grow. The reading of these two authors is recommended—as is also a better and more intimate acquaintance with Charles Lamb. Here is a triumvirate that will drive into outer darkness all fits of the blues. God will be shown to be in his heaven, and all will be well with the world.