The Seer, or Commonplaces Refreshed

BY LEIGH HUNT. In Two Volumes. Boston : Roberts Brothers.

AMONG the books most prized, in our modest private book-room, are some which bear the delicate and graceful autograph of Leigh Hunt, having floated from his deserted library to these American shores. There is the Apollonius from which came the text of his poem of “The Panther”; — this is his mark against the legend, on page sixty-nine ; and here is the old engraving of Apollonius, which he no doubt inserted as a frontispiece to the book. Here again is his copy of Rousseau’s “ Confessions,” Holyoake’s translation, annotated through and through with Hunt’s humane and penetrating criticisms on a nature with which his own had much in common, though purer and sweeter. This volume of Milton’s “ Minor Poems” was his also, with the rich and varied notes of Warton, the edition of whose literary charms he somewhere speaks with such delight. Here also is Forster’s “ Perennial Calendar,” a book of rural gossip, such as Leigh Hunt thoroughly enjoyed ; and this copy of Aubrey de Vere’s Poems was a present from the author. Above all, perhaps, one dwells with interest on a volume of Hennell’s “ Christianity and Infidelity,” riddled through and through by penand-ink underscorings, extending sometimes to every line upon a page. The book ends with a generous paragraph in assertion of the comfort and sufficiency of Natural Religion ; and after it comes, written originally in pencil, then in ink again, always with the same firm and elegant handwriting, the indorsement, “ Amen. So be it. L. H. July 14th, 1857.” This was written in his seventy-third year, two years before his death, and this must have been about the time of Hawthorne’s visit to him. Read the “ Amen ” in the light of that beautiful description of patient and frugal old age, and it is a touching and noble memorial.

Americans often fancied that they noticed something American in Leigh Hunt’s physique and manners, without knowing how near he came to owning a Cisatlantic birth. His mother was a Philadelphian; and his father, a West-Indian, resided in this country until within a few years of his death. It is fitting, therefore, that our publishers should keep his writings in the market, and this is well done in this handsome edition of “ The Seer.” These charming essays will bear preservation ; none are more saturated with cultivated taste and literary allusion, and in none are more graceful pictures painted on a slighter canvas. If there is an occasional impression of fragility and superficiality, it is yet wholly in character, and seems not to interfere with the peculiar charm. Hunt, for instance, writes a delightful paper on the theme of “ Cricket,” without ten allusions to the game, or one indication of ever having stopped to watch it. He discourses deliciously upon Anacreon’s “ Tettix,” — the modern Cicada, — and then calls it a beetle. There is apt, indeed, to be a pervading trace of that kind of conscious effort which is technically called “ book-making,” and one certainly finds the entertainment a little frothy, at times, compared with the elder essayists. Nevertheless, Leigh Hunt’s roses always bloom, his breezes are always “ redolent of joy and youth,” and his sunny spirit pervades even a rainy day. Chaucer and Keats never yet have found a more delicate or discriminating critic ; and his paper on Wordsworth, beside the fine touches, has solider qualities that command one’s admiration. The personal memorials of the author’s literary friends have a peculiar charm to us in this land and generation, for whom Hazlitt and Keats are names almost as shadowy and romantic as Amadis or Lancelot; but best of all is his noble tribute to Shelley. After speaking (Vol. II. p. 138) of the deep philanthropy which lay beneath the apparent cynicism of Hazlitt, he thus continues : — “ But only imagine a man who should feel this interest too, and be deeply amiable, and have great sufferings, bodily and mental, and know his own errors, and waive the claim of his own virtues, and manifest an unceasing considerateness of the comforts of those about him, in the very least as well as greatest things,—surviving, in the pure life of his heart, all mistake, all misconception, all exasperation, and ever having a soft word in his extremity, not only for those who consoled, but for those who distressed him ; and imagine how we must have loved him. It was Mr. Shelley.”

Such an epitaph writes the character not only of him who receives the tribute, but of him who pays it. And if there ever lived a literary man who might fitly claim for his funeral stone the inscription, “ Lord, keep my memory green,” it was the sweet-tempered, flower-loving Leigh Hunt.