Hunt finds other gentle qualities in a stone, citing the opening lines of Keats’s Hyperion, where he describes the dethroned monarch of the gods, sitting in his exile:
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and Eve’s one star,
Sate gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone.
Nothing certainly can be more quiet than a stone. It utters not a syllable nor a sigh.
Shakespeare had the knack of seeing power in things gentle:
Weariness
Can snore upon the flint, when restive sloth
Finds the down pillow hard.
“If you are melancholy for the first time, you will find upon a little inquiry that others have been melancholy many times, and yet are cheerful now,” Hunt writes in the Indicator. “If you are melancholy many times, recollect that you have got over all those times.”
This is good advice, and true. Exercise is recommended as a promoter of cheerfulness. Such a high opinion of the value of exercise was held by Plato that he maintained it was a cure even for a wounded conscience. In the same article Hunt suggests that one should not want money for money’s sake. Certes, Hunt never craved money for the purpose of hoarding it. Nearly all his life he needed money acutely, but when a generous sum came into his possession he did not know how to keep it; nay, he did not know how to use it properly. He was always “hard up,” simply because he was a child in money matters. Withal, he was optimistic and cheerful, even to the extent of remaining at home because he did not possess the means of purchasing presentable clothing. When his wife wrote him that after paying for a loaf of bread she would not have a penny in her pocket, Hunt writes her in a cheerful way. Some of us with a less keen perception of cheerful situations, or with less ability to surmount calamities would find it rather difficult to be as cheerful as Hunt seemed to be.
Hunt’s correspondence, both published and unpublished, bears testimony to his cheerfulness even when the clouds were the darkest. Speaking of the two volumes of Correspondence edited in 1862 by his son Thornton, Edmund Ollier, the publisher, thus bears tribute to the man and his buoyancy of spirit even under very trying circumstances. In these volumes, he says, “we see him as those who knew him familiarly saw him in his everyday life. Sometimes overclouded with the shadow of affliction, but more often bright and hopeful, and at all times taking a keen delight in beautiful things; in the exhaustless world of books and art; in the rising genius of young authors; in the immortal language of music; in trees, and flowers, and old memorial nooks of London and its suburbs; in the sunlight which came, as he used to say, like a visitor out of heaven, glorifying humble places; in the genial intercourse of mind with mind ... A heart and soul so gifted could not but share largely in the happiness with which the Divine Ruler of the Universe has compensated our sorrows; and he had loving hearts about him to the last, to sweeten all.”
Hunt’s gentleness and cheerfulness are shown in his essays, as well as in his poetry. Perhaps none of his essays evidences these qualities of his heart and mind more forcibly than “A Day by the Fire,” which was written for the Reflector in 1812, when he was twenty-eight years of age. “I am one of those that delight in a fireside,” he begins, at once thereby telling us that he loves kindliness and cheerfulness. For no man who loves a fire on the hearth, especially a fire made of old wood, can be a sour old curmudgeon. It is as impossible as it is for one not to love a sweet little girl.
Hunt would have his fire left quite to itself, without a tea-kettle, “bubbling and loud-hissing,” which “throws up a steamy column,” as Cowper tells it. Such a fire “has full room to breathe and to blaze,” and he can poke it as he pleases. “Poke it as I please!” he continues. “Think, benevolent reader, think of the pride and pleasure of having in your hand that awful, but at the same time artless, weapon, a poker; of putting it into the proper bar, gently levering up the coals, and seeing the instant and bustling flame above!”