"Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there,"
he gave me the day after one of our visits, and very shortly after his installation at the cottage.
"Give me a golden pen, and let me lean,"
was another, upon being compelled to leave "at an early hour." But the occasion that recurs to me with the liveliest interest was the evening when, some observations having been made upon the character, habits, and pleasant associations of that reverenced denizen of the hearth, the cheerful little fireside grasshopper, Hunt proposed to Keats the challenge of writing, then, there, and to time, a sonnet "On the Grasshopper and the Cricket." No one was present but myself, and they accordingly set to. I, absent with a book at the end of the sofa, could not avoid furtive glances, every now and then, at the emulants. I cannot say how long the trial lasted; I was not proposed umpire, and had no stop-watch for the occasion: the time, however, was short, for such a performance; and Keats won, as to time. But the event of the after-scrutiny was one of many such occurrences which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard and admiration, for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious encouragement: his sincere look of pleasure at the first line,—
"The poetry of earth is never dead";
"Such a prosperous opening!" he said; and when he came to the tenth and eleventh lines,—
"On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence";
"Ah! that's perfect! bravo, Keats!"—and then he went on in a dilation upon, the dumbness of all Nature during the season's suspension and torpidity. With all the kind and gratifying things that were said to him, Keats protested to me, as we were afterwards walking home, that he preferred Hunt's treatment of the subject to his own.
He had left the neighborhood of the Borough, and was now living with his brothers in apartments on the second floor of a house in the Poultry, over the passage leading to the Queen's Head Tavern, and opposite one of the City Companies' Halls,—the Ironmongers', if I mistake not. I have the associating reminiscence of many happy hours spent in this lodging. Here was determined upon, in great part written, and sent forth to the world, the first little, but vigorous, offspring of his brain:—