He brought an eye for all he saw;
He mixt in all our simple sports;
They pleased him, fresh from brawling courts
And dusky purlieus of the law.
O joy to him in this retreat,
Immantled in ambrosial dark,
To drink the cooler air, and mark
The landscape winking through the heat:
O sound to rout the brood of cares,
The sweep of scythe in morning dew,
The gust that round the garden flew,
And tumbled half the mellowing pears!
O bliss, when all in circle drawn
About him, heart and ear were fed
To hear him, as he lay and read
The Tuscan poets on the lawn:
Or in the all-golden afternoon
A guest, or happy sister, sung,
Or here she brought the harp and flung
A ballad to the brightening moon:
Nor less it pleased in livelier moods,
Beyond the bounding hill to stray.
And break the livelong summer day
With banquet in the distant woods;
Whereat we glanced from theme to theme,
Discuss'd the books to love or hate,
Or touch'd the changes of the state,
Or threaded some Socratic dream;
But if I praised the busy town,
He loved to rail against it still,
For 'ground' in yonder social mill
We rub each other's angles down.
'And merge,' he said, 'in form and loss
The picturesque of man and man.'
We talk'd: the stream beneath us ran,
The wine-flask lying couch'd in moss,
Or cool'd within the glooming wave;
And last, returning from afar,
Before the crimson-circled star
Had fallen into her father's grave.
And brushing ankle-deep in flowers,
We heard behind the woodbine vail
The milk that bubbled in the pail,
And buzzings of the honeyed hours.
"The volume is pervaded by a religious feeling, and an ardent aspiration for the advancement of society,—as may be gathered from our first quotation. These two sentiments impart elevation, faith, and resignation; so that memory, thought, and a chastened tenderness, generally predominate over deep grief. The grave character of the theme forbids much indulgence in conceits such as Tennyson sometimes falls into, and the execution is more finished than his volumes always are: there are very few prosaic lines, and few instances of that excess of naturalness which degenerates into the mawkish. The nature of the plan—which, after all, is substantially though not in form a set of sonnets on a single theme—is favorable to those pictures of common landscape and of daily life, redeemed from triviality by genial feeling and a perception of the lurking beautiful, which are the author's distinguishing characteristic. The scheme, too, enables him appropriately to indulge in theological and metaphysical reflections; where he is not quite so excellent. Many of the pieces taken singly are happy examples of Tennyson, though not perhaps the very happiest. As a whole, there is inevitably something of sameness in the work, and the subject is unequal to its long expansion; yet its nature is such, there is so much of looseness in the plan, that it might have been doubled or trebled without incongruity. It is one of those books which depend upon individual will and feeling, rather than upon a broad subject founded in nature and tractable by the largest laws of art. Hence, though not irrespective of laws, such works depend upon instinctive felicity—felicity in the choice of topics and the mode of execution, felicity both in doing and in leaving undone: this high and perfect excellence, perhaps, In Memoriam has not reached, though omission and revision might lead very close to it."
ETHERIZATION.—A writer in the Medical Times says, "The day, perhaps, may not be far off, when we shall be able to suspend the sensibility of the nervous chords, without acting on the center of the nervous system, just as we are enabled to suspend circulation in an artery without acting on the heart."
LEIGH HUNT
One of the most delightful books of the season will be The Autobiography of LEIGH HUNT, which is being reprinted by Harper & Brothers, and will very soon be given to the American public in an edition of suitable elegance. The last great race of poets and literary men, observes a writer in the London Standard, is now rapidly vanishing from the scene: of the splendid constellation, in the midst of which Campbell, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Southey, Crabbe, and Byron, were conspicuous, how few remain! Moore (rapidly declining), Rogers (upward of eighty), Professor Wilson, Montgomery, and Leigh Hunt, are nearly all. It is fitting that we prize these few, as the remnants of a magnificent group, which cannot be expected very soon to be repeated.
Leigh Hunt has, for nearly half a century, occupied a prominent place in the public eye, as a politician of a peculiarly bold and decided stamp, when boldness was necessary for the utterance of the truth; and as a poet and prose-writer of a singularly-genial and amiable character. As the chief founder and critic of the Examiner, he would doubtless occupy a high place in literary history, but as the author of "Rimini" he is entitled to a more enduring and enviable fame. This will always stand at the head of his works: but his "Indicator," his "London Journal," his "Jar of Honey," and others, abound with the illustrations of a most imaginative and cordial spirit.
We are glad to possess a good autobiography of Leigh Hunt. It is the first we have from a long list of celebrated men; and no one could give us such correct, discerning, and delightful insights into their usual life and true characters. Hazlitt, Lamb, Shelley, Keats, Byron, and a crowd of others become familiar to us in these pages. It was in the Examiner that the first compositions of Shelley and Keats were introduced to the British public; and the friendship which Mr. Hunt maintained with those poets, till their deaths, casts a sunshine over that portion of his life, which is peculiarly charming.
Perhaps the two points of this Autobiography which will most attract the attention of the reader are the author's imprisonment for a libel on the Prince Regent, and his visit to Italy. In that imprisonment of two years, he was visited by Byron, Moore, Brougham, Bentham, and several other eminent men. In the journey to Italy, which was undertaken in order to coöperate with Byron and Shelley in bringing out of the "Liberal," Hunt had the misfortune to be deprived of Shelley's friendship, by death, immediately on his arrival; and of the friendship of Byron, through incompatibilities of taste, and the jealous officiousness of Byron's friends, amongst whom Moore bore a prominent part. Mr. Hunt published a volume on the subject soon after his return to England, which occasioned him a great deal of ill-will.