doctrine which he was called on to accept, the
writer adds: "This is poetry, you will say,
and not argument; but then there comes upon
me another fancy, which would fain persuade
me that poetry is the argument of a higher
sphere." It would be interesting to know what
response, if any, Shelley made to this letter;
but there is no doubt that such a strain was
precisely the one in which to write to him under
the circumstances: considering that sentiment,
emotion, and mysticism prevailed in his nature
even over the habit of rigorously exacting a
reason for every article of faith. With Leigh
Hunt, the instincts of the affections were in
themselves arguments. As he said in one of
his published writings, with a depth and
comprehensiveness worthy of Bacon, "Feelings
are Nature's reasons." This truly religious
tendency of mind increased and ripened with
years and sorrow. When in great trouble in
Italy after the death of Shelley, he composed a
collection of Prayers and Meditations,
subsequently printed for private distribution under
the title of Christianism; and, about six years
before his death, the beautiful volume called
the Religion of the Heart proved to a wider
circle of readers how seriously he had been
misapprehended by those who called him a scoffer
and materialist. Affliction, which exasperates
some men and deadens others, had with him
the effect of bringing out with greater ardour
and sweetness the best and most loveable
elements of his nature. "I am naturally a man
of violent passions," he writes, as far back as
1806; and, much as this may startle those who
complain of an excess of suavity in his published
works, it was true to the extent of his having a
West Indian vehemence of feeling (for he was
the son of a Barbadoes gentleman) a vehemence
which sometimes implied strong antipathies,
though never conscious injustice. But,
at any moment of sorrow, his sympathies, broad
at all times, became even more expansive and
benignly human. He lost a child in the year
1827, at which period he was divided by certain
differences from a near connexion; and it was in
the first agony of his grief that he wrote to
that connexion the following affecting words:

"You know what took place on Saturday last
with my poor little boy. I think, if you could
see his little gentle dead body, calm as an
angel, and looking wise in his innocence beyond
all the troubles of this earth, you would agree
with me in concluding (especially as you have
lost little darlings of your own), that there is
nothing worth contesting here below, except
who shall be kindest to one another. There
seems to be something in these moments by
which life recommences with the survivors: I
mean, we seem to be beginning, in a manner,
the world again, with calmer if with sadder
thoughts, and, wiping our eyes and readjusting
the burden on our backs, to set out anew on
our roads, with a greater wish to help and
console one another . . . . . He was always for
settling disputes when he saw them. He
showed this disposition to the last; and though,
in the errors and frailties common to all of us,
we may naturally dislike to be taught by one
another, we can have no objection to be taught
by an angelic little child."

The letter had its effect. The differences were
put an end to, and the sorrow which had
stricken the writer's heart was made to bear
its worthy fruit—the healing of old dissensions,
and the renewal of still older affection.
Thirty years later, when Leigh Hunt was still
suffering keenly from the death of another son,
whom he had lost five years previously to the
later date, another unhappy family quarrel drew
him into writing thus, to one of the persons
involved: "There is a name you love, which I have
not yet had the courage to utter to you ever since
its owner left us. Scarcely a day still passes in
which I do not call upon it in tears in my lonely
room. Do not let me miss another dear son,
who is living. I am not well, and I do not
think you would like me (though better) to
continue sick without letting you know." The son
whose name the writer had "not yet had courage
to utter" was Vincent Leigh Hunt, who died of
consumption in 1852, after having given
evidence of possessing some portion of his father's
faculty, and, what was better still, a nature of
great nobility. For the remaining seven years
of his life, this sorrow haunted the father's heart
with ever-renewing sharpness; but it brought
with it, at least, this consolation—that it made
him the less unwilling to quit those of his
family and circle of friends who still remained,
and strengthened his hopes of the hereafter.
Writing in November, 1857, to a friend who
had recently experienced a great domestic
calamity, he says: "I should be one of the
unhappiest, instead of the most resigned, of men
at this moment, if I did not constantly, and, as
it were, instinctively, feel that I should rejoin
all the dear ones whom I have lost—words that
now, as I write, wring bitter and unsufficing
tears from the quivering of the soul within me."
References such as this are constant in the later
letters; and that Leigh Hunt often expressed to
himself, in private, the grief which he never
exorcised, however much he might irradiate its
darkness with the splendour of a supernatural
dawn, seems to be shown by certain lines printed
in the present volume, as a note to a letter
communicating the death to which allusion has
just been made. The second paragraph is
somewhat obscure; but the "quivering of the soul"
is painfully apparent throughout:

Waking at morn, with the accustom'd sigh
For what no morn could ever bring me more,
And again sighing, while collecting strength
To meet the pangs that waited me, like one
Whose sleep the rack hath watch'd, I tried to feel
How good for me had been strange griefs of old,
That for long days, months, years, inured my wits
To bear the dreadful burden of one thought.

One thought with woful need turned many ways,
Which, shunn'd at first, and scaring me, as wounds
Thrusting in wound, became, oh! almost clasp'd
And blest, as saviours from one dire pang
That mock'd the will to move it.