Page images
PDF
EPUB

Something not to be replaced would be struck out of the gentler literature of our century, could the mind of Leigh Hunt cease to speak to us in a book. EDWARD BULWER, LORD LYTTON.

Into whatever he has written he has put a living soul; and much of what he has produced is brilliant either with wit and humor, or with tenderness and beauty. GEORGE L. CRAIK.

Leigh Hunt seems the very opposite of Hazlitt. He loves everything, he catches the sunny side of everything, and, excepting that he has a few polemical antipathies, finds everything beautiful.

HENRY CRABB ROBINSON.

He is, in truth, one of the pleasantest writers of his time, — easy, colloquial, genial, human, full of fine fancies and verbal niceties, possessing a loving if not a "learned spirit," with hardly a spice of bitterness in his composition.

E. P. WHIPPLE.

I have been reading some of Leigh Hunt's works lately, and am surprised at the freshness, and sweetness, and Christian, not lax, spirit of human benevolence and toleration which existed in the heart of one who was the contemporary, and even colleague, of Byron.

- FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON.

A DAY BY THE FIRE.

AM one of those that delight in a fireside, and can enjoy it without even the help of a cat or a tea-kettle. To cats, indeed, I have an aversion, as animals that only affect a sociality,

without caring a jot for any thing but their own luxury; * and my tea-kettle, I frankly confess, has long been displaced, or rather dismissed, by a bronze-colored and graceful urn; though, between ourselves, I am not sure that I have gained any thing by the exchange. Cowper, it is true, talks of the "bubbling and loud-hissing urn," which

"Throws up a steamy column;"

[ocr errors]

its

but there was something so primitive and unaffected, so warm-hearted and unpresuming, in the tea-kettle, song was so much more cheerful and continued, and it kept the water so hot and comfortable as long as you wanted it, that I sometimes feel as if I had sent off a good, plain, faithful old friend, who had but one wish to serve me, for a superficial, smooth-faced upstart of a fellow, who, after a little promising and vaporing, grows cold

*This was written in the early days of Leigh Hunt's literary career; but years after, when he was older and wiser, he did full and complete justice to the familiar household cat, in an admirable paper, entitled, "The Cat by the Fire," published in "The Seer." - ED.

« PreviousContinue »