“Hunt,” says Shelley, “was one of those happy souls which are the salt of the earth, and without whom this earth would smell like what it is—a tomb; who is what others seem.”
Hunt viewed his many misfortunes in a kindly spirit, showing us often what fine things may come to us out of human suffering. It is a benediction, a peace-compelling exercise to spend an evening with Hunt. His optimism is catching. One cannot get away from it. He writes of Samuel Johnson: “How much good and entertainment did not the very necessities of such a man help to produce us.” This is a saying we may apply to Hunt himself.
Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, one of his best publications, states that its object is “Pleasure ... the pleasure recommended alike by the most doubting experiment, and the most trusting faith—that of making the utmost of this green and golden world, the smallest particles of whose surface we have not yet learned to turn to account—that of profiting alike from the toil that is incumbent on us, and from ‘the lilies of the valley that toil not, neither do they spin.’... We say nothing we do not think, and manifest no feelings which are not those of our daily life and our most habitual enjoyments, our talisman against trouble, and our best reward for exertion—a leaf, a flower, a fine passage of music, or poetry, or painting, a belief in a thousand capabilities of earth and man, give us literally as much delight as we say they do. We should not otherwise have been able to get through ‘a sea of troubles,’ not to recommend as we do the loving light that has saved us.”
Hunt’s motto for his Indicator, a publication praised by Charles Lamb, is a cheerful one: “A dram of sweet is worth a pound of sour.” It was taken from Spenser, one of Hunt’s favorites, and was suggested by Mrs. Novello, mother of Mary Cowden Clarke, as we are told in Letters to an Enthusiast: “By the way, did you know that my mother was the godmother of the ‘Indicator?’ She suggested its name, and Leigh Hunt adopted it, and the passage as a motto which she had pointed out as offering ground for a good title.”
Hunt could get cheerfulness out of a pebble even. “Strike it,” he says, “and you will get something out of him: warm his heart, and out come the genial sparks that shall gladden your hearth, and put hot dishes on your table.” The brook singeth, states Coleridge in that beautiful stanza:
A voice of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.
And Hunt observes it would not sing so well without the stone.
Then in his light, airy way he calls our attention to that exquisite little poem by Wordsworth on the fair maiden who died by the river Dove:
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye;
Fair as the star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
And he asks if anything can express a lovelier loneliness, than the violet half hidden by the mossy stone.