Part 35

"The church of Santa Croce," says Mr. Hunt, "would disappoint you as much inside as out, if the presence of great men did not always cast a mingled shadow of the awful and beautiful over our thoughts." He then adds, "Agreeably to our old rustic propensities, we did not stop long in the city. We left Santa Croce to live at Maiano, a village on the slope of one of the Fiesolan hills, about two miles off. I passed there a very disconsolate time; yet the greatest comfort I experienced in Italy was from being in that neighborhood, and thinking, as I went about, of Boccaccio. Boccaccio's father had a house at Maiano, supposed to have been situate at the Fiesolan extremity of the hamlet. That divine writer, whose sensibility outweighed his levity a hundredfold--as a divine face is oftener serious than it is merry--was so fond of the place, that he not only laid the two scenes of the Decamerone on each side of it, with the valley his company resorted to in the middle, but has made the two little streams that embrace Maiano, the Affrico and the Mensola, the hero and heroine of his Nimphale Fiesolano. A lover and his vestal mistress are changed into them, after the fashion of Ovid. The scene of another of his works is on the banks of the Mugnone, a river a little distant; and the Decamerone is full of the neighboring villages. Out of the windows of one side of our house, we saw the turret of the Villa Gherardi, to which his 'joyous company' resorted in the first instance; a house belonging to the Machiavelli was nearer, a little on the left; and farther to the left, among the blue hills, was the white village of Settignano, where Michael Angelo was born. The house is still remaining in the possession of the family. From our windows on the other side, we saw, close to us, the Fiesole of antiquity and of Milton, the site of the Boccaccio house before mentioned still closer, the valley of Ladies at our feet; and we looked toward the quarter of the Mugnone, and of a house of Dante, and in the distance beheld the mountains of Pistoia. Lastly, from the terrace in front, Florence lay clear and cathedraled before us, with the scene of Redi's Bacchus rising on the other side of it, and the villa of Arcetri, illustrious for Galileo.

"But I stuck to my Boccaccio haunts, as to an old home. I lived with the divine human being, with his friends of the Falcon and the Basil, and my own not unworthy melancholy; and went about the flowery hills and lanes, solitary, indeed, and sick to the heart, but not unsustained. * * * My almost daily walk was to Fiesole, through a path skirted with wild myrtle and cyclamen; and I stopped at the cloister of the Doccia, and sat on the pretty melancholy platform behind it, reading, or looking through the pines down to Florence. In the valley of Ladies, I found some English trees,--trees not vine and olive,--and even a bit of meadow; and these, while I made them furnish me with a bit of my old home in the north, did no injury to the memory of Boccaccio, who is of all countries, and finds his home wherever we do ourselves, in love, in the grave, in a desert island."

In the twenty-third article of the Wishing Cap, Mr. Hunt gives us this further description of Fiesole and the valley of Ladies:--

"Milton and Galileo give a glory to Fiesole beyond even its starry antiquity; nor perhaps is there a name eminent in the best annals of Florence, to which some connections can not be traced with this favored spot. When it was full of wood, it must have been eminently beautiful. It is at present, indeed, full of vines and olives, but this is not wood _woody_: not arboraceous, and properly sylvan. A few poplars and forest trees mark out the course of the Affrico; and the convent ground contrived to retain a good slice of evergreens, which make a handsome contrast on the hillside with its white cloister. But agriculture, quarries, and wood-fires have destroyed the rest. Nevertheless, I now found the whole valley beautiful. It is sprinkled with white cottages; the cornfields presented agreeable paths, leading among vines and fig-trees; and I discovered even a meadow; a positive English meadow, with the hay cut, and adorned with English trees. In a grassy lane, betwixt the corn, sat a fair rustic, receiving the homage of three young fellows of her acquaintance. In the time of Boccaccio, the Affrico formed a little crystal lake, in which (the said lake behaving itself, and being properly sequestered) the ladies of his company, one day, bathe themselves. The gentlemen, being informed of it, follow their example in the afternoon; and the next day the whole party dine, take their _siesta_ under the trees, and recount their novels. This lake has now disappeared before the husbandman, as if it were a fairy thing, of which a money-getting age was unworthy. Part of the Affrico is also closed up from the passenger by private grounds; but the rest of it runs as clearly as it did; and under the convent, a remnant of the woodier part of the valley, a delicious remnant, is still existing. The stream jumps into it, as if with delight, and goes slipping down little banks. It is embowered with olives and young chestnut-trees, and looks up to the long, white cloister, which is a conspicuous object over the country.

"A white convent, a woody valley, chestnut-trees intensely green, a sky intensely blue, a stream at which it is a pleasure to stop and drink,--behold a subject fit for a day in August.

"This then is the 'Valle delle Donne.' If Boccaccio's spirit ever visits his native country, here must it repose. It is a place for a knight in romance to take his rest in, his head on his elbow, and the sound of the water in his ear.

"I whisk to England in my Wishing Cap, and fetch the reader to enjoy the place with me.

"How do you like it? Is it not a glen most glen-icular? a confronting of two leafy banks, with a rivulet between? Shouldn't you like to live in the house over the way, where the doves are? If you walk a little way to the left, through the chestnut-trees, you see Florence. The convent up above us on the right is the one I spoke of. There is nobody in it now, but a peasant for housekeeper. Look at this lad coming down the path with his olive complexion and black eyes. He is bringing goats. I see them emerging from the trees; huge creatures, that when they rise on their hind legs to nibble the boughs, almost look formidable. There is Theocritus for you. And here is Theocritus or Longus, which you will; for a peasant-girl is with him, one of the pleasantest countenances in the world, with a forehead and eyes fit for a poetess; as they all have. I wish the fellow were as neat as his companion, but somehow these goatherds look of a piece with their goats. They love a ragged picturesque."

From this charming and celebrated spot of earth, Leigh Hunt turned northward and homeward through Switzerland and France. Every lover of true poetry and of an excellent and high-hearted man, must regret that his visit to Italy was dashed by such melancholy circumstances, for no man was ever made more thoroughly to enjoy that fine climate and classical land. Yet as the friend of Shelley, Keats, Charles Lamb, and others of the first spirits of the age, Mr. Hunt must be allowed, in this respect, to have been one of the happiest of men. It were no mean boon of providence to have been permitted to live in the intimacy of men like these; but, beside this, he had the honor to suffer, with those beautiful and immortal spirits, calumny and persecution. They have achieved justice through death--he has lived injustice down. As a politician, there is a great debt of gratitude due to him from the people, for he was their firm champion when reformers certainly did not walk about in silken slippers. He fell on evil days, and he was one of the first and foremost to mend them. In literature he has distinguished himself in various walks; and in all he has manifested the same genial, buoyant, hopeful, and happy spirit. His Sir Ralph Esher, a novel of Charles II.'s time, is a work which is full of thought and fine painting of men and nature. His Indicator and his London Journal abound with papers which make us in love at once with the writer and ourselves. There is a charm cast over everyday life, that makes us congratulate ourselves that we live. All that is beautiful and graceful in nature, and love-inspiring in our fellow-men, is brought out and made part of our daily walk and pleasure. His Months, a calendar of nature, bears testimony to his intense love of nature, which breathes equally in every page of his poetry. In these prose works, however, as well as in some of his earlier poetry, we find certain artificialities of phrase, fanciful expressions, and what are often termed conceits, which the critics treated as cockneyisms, and led them to style him the head of the Cockney school. There are certainly many indications, particularly in The Months, of his regarding the country rather as a visitor than an inhabitant. His _Standpunct_, as the Germans call it, his point of standing, or in our phraseology, his point of view from which he contemplates nature, is the town. He thus produces to a countryman a curious inversion of illustration. For instance, he compares April to a lady watering her flowers at a balcony; and we almost expect him, in praising real flowers, to say that they are nearly equal to artificial ones. But these are but the specks on a sun-disk, all glowing with the most genuine love of nature. In no writer does the love of the beautiful and the good more abound. And, after all, the fanciful epithets in which he endeavors to clothe as fanciful notions, are, as he himself has explained, nothing whatever belonging to London, or the land of Cockayne, but to his having imbued his mind long and deeply with the poetry, and, as a matter of course, with the poetic language of our older writers. In a wider acquaintance with nature, the world, and literature, these have vanished from his style; and I know of no more manly, English, and chastely vigorous style than that of his poems in general. In conformity with the strictures of various critics, he has, moreover, rewritten his fine poem Rimini. It was objected that the story was not very moral, and he has now, in the smaller edition published by Moxon, altered the story so as to palliate this objection as much as possible, and, as he says, to bring it, in fact, nearer to the truth of the case. For my part, I know not what moral the critics would have, if wretchedness and death, as the consequences of sin, be not a solemn moral. If the selfish old father, who deceives his daughter into a marriage by presenting to her the proxy as the proposed spouse, is punished by finding his daughter and this proxy prince, who went out from him with pomp and joy, soon come back to him in a herse, and with all his ambitious projects thus dashed to the ground, is not held as a solemn warning, where shall such be found? However, the poet has shown his earnest desire to set himself right with the public, and the public has now the poem in its two shapes, and can accommodate its delicate self at its pleasure. I regret that the space allowed for this notice does not permit me to point out a number of those delightful passages which abound in his beautiful and graceful poems. The graphic as well as dramatic power of Rimini, the landscape and scene-painting of that poem, are only exceeded by the force with which the progress of passion and evil is delineated. The scene in the gardens and the pavilion, where the lovers are reading Lancelot du Lac, is not surpassed by any thing of the kind in the language. The sculptured scenes on the walls of this pavilion are all pictures living in every line:--

"The sacrifice By girls and shepherds brought, with reverend eyes, Of sylvan drinks and foods, simple and sweet, And goats with struggling horns and planted feet."

The opening of the poem, beginning--

"The sun is up, and 'tis a morn of May Round old Ravenna's clear-shown towers and bay,"--

all life, elasticity, and sunshine;--and the melancholy ending--

"The days were then at close of autumn--still, A little rainy, and toward nightfall chill: There was a fitful moaning all abroad; And ever and anon over the road, The last few leaves came fluttering from the trees," etc.,

are passages of exquisite beauty, marking the change from joy to sorrow in one of the loveliest poems in the language. We have in it the genuine spirit of Chaucer, the rich nervous cadences of Dryden, with all the grace and life of modern English. But it is in vain here to attempt to speak of the poetic merits of Leigh Hunt. A host of fine compositions comes crowding on our consciousness. The Legend of Florence, a noble tragedy; The Palfrey; Hero and Leander; The Feast of the Poets; and The Violets; numbers of delightful translations from the Italian, a literature in which Leigh Hunt has always reveled; and above all, Captain Sword and Captain Pen. We would recommend every body, just now that the war-spirit is rising among us, to read that poem, and learn what horrors they are rejoicing over, and what the Christian spirit of this age demands of us. But we must praise the lyrics of the volume:--the pathos of the verses "To T. L. H., six years old, during a sickness," and the playful humor of those "To J. H., four years old," call on us for notice; and then the fine blank verse poems, Our Cottage, and Reflections of a Dead Body, are equally importunate. If any one does not yet know what Leigh Hunt has done for the people and the age, let him get the pocket edition of his poems, and he will soon find himself growing in love with life, with his fellow-men, and with himself. The philosophy of Leigh Hunt is loving, cheerful, and confiding in the goodness that governs us all. And when we look back to what was the state of things when he began to write, and then look round and see what it is now, we must admit that he has a good foundation for so genial a faith.

It remains only to take a glance or two at his English homes. To several of these we can trace him. Soon after his quitting Horsemonger-lane prison, he was living at Paddington, having a study looking over the fields toward Westbourne-green. In this he had a narrow escape one morning of being burned, owing his escape to some "fair cousin" not named. There he was visited by Lord Byron and Wordsworth. At one time he was living at 8, York-buildings, New-road, Marylebone. In the London Journal of January 7, 1835, Mr. Hunt gives a very charming account of a very happy Twelfth Night spent there, and in commemoration of it planted some young plane-trees within the rails by the garden gate. Under these trees, but a year or two ago, he had the pleasure of seeing people sheltering from the rain; but they are now cut down. Here he first had the pleasure of seeing John Keats, and here he was visited by Foscolo. At other times he lived in Lisson-grove; at Hampstead, in the Vale of Health, where, as already observed, Keats wrote Sleep and Poetry; at Highgate, near Coleridge; and at Woodcote-green, near Ashstead-park, in Surrey, where he laid the scene, and, I believe, wrote the romance, of Sir Ralph Esher.

Since his return to England he has lived chiefly in the suburbs of London, in what Milton called "garden houses;" for some years in Chelsea, near Thomas Carlyle; and now in Edwardes-square, Kensington, a square of small, neat houses, built by a Frenchman, it is said in expectation of the conquest of England by Bonaparte, and with a desire to be ready settled, and with homes for his countrymen of more limited means against that event. The speculation failing with the mightier speculation of Napoleon, the poor Frenchman was ruined.

Such is a hasty sketch of the many wanderings and sojourns of Leigh Hunt. May his age be rewarded for the services of his youth. In closing this article I would, also with this wish, express another, and that is, that he would sometime publish that small, but most beautiful manual of domestic devotion, called by him Christianism, and printed only for private circulation, some years ago. The object of this little work seems to be, to give to such as had not full faith in Christianity an idea of what is excellent in it, and by which they might be benefited and comforted, even though they could not attain full belief in its authenticity. The spirit and style of it are equally beautiful.

SAMUEL ROGERS.

One of the greatest pleasures that an author can have, is to record the delight which he has derived from other authors; after a long career of intellectual enjoyment, to pay the due tribute of gratitude to those writers of an antecedent period who have laid the foundations of his taste, and stimulated him in that career which has made his happiness. This is always an act of love, an act of reverence and regard, which is full of its own peculiar pleasure. But how much is this pleasure augmented, when this tribute can be paid to the living; to one who preceded us, and yet is still among us; to the teacher of the past, to the patriarch of the present! Of the writers, and especially the poets, who charmed our young and inexperienced spirits, how few are those whose works will bear the test of time; how few to whom we can turn, at a mature age, and find them all that we ever believed them to be! Mr. Rogers is one of this rare class. Among the very earliest literary pleasures which I can remember, was that of reading--and that time after time--his Pleasures of Memory: and the reading of this poem is now, after nearly half-a-century, not only one of my pleasures of memory, but, on reperusal, is equally fresh, equally true to nature, and equally attractive, by the soundness and the beauty of its sentiments. Mr. Rogers stands among us, if not the very oldest living literary man, yet by far the oldest of our poets; and it is a welcome testimony to the good sense and feeling of the age, that he stands among us with all the affectionate respect and the honor which he has so well won. Mr. Rogers, I believe, has never met with that species of Mohawk criticism, that scalping and scarifying literary assault and battery, which so many of his cotemporaries have had to undergo. There was a gentleness and a calm suavity about his writings which disarmed the most eager assailant of merit. There was in him an absence of that militant and antagonistic spirit which provokes the like animus. There was felt only the purity of taste, the deep love of beauty in art and nature, the vivid yet tender sympathy with humanity, which put every one dreadfully in the wrong who should attempt to strike down their possessor. The very first line of criticism applied to the writings of Mr. Rogers, was in the Monthly Review, on his Ode to Superstition, with some other Poems, published by Cadell, in 1786, and was this--"In these pieces we perceive the hand of a master."

The master thus discovered in the first essay of his power, has never ceased since to be acknowledged. In 1792, or six years afterward, he published the Pleasures of Memory, which was received with universal and delighted acclamation. It took hold, at once, of the English heart; and became, and remains, and is likely to remain, one of the classic beauties of our national poetry. From that day, to so late a period as 1830, Mr. Rogers, at leisurely but tolerably regular intervals, has gone on adding to the riches of our hoards of taste and genius. In 1798, or in another six years, he published his Epistle, with other Poems; in 1812, or fourteen years afterward, The Voyage of Columbus; two years after that, Jacqueline, _i.e._, in 1814; five years later, or in 1819, Human Life; and, finally, in 1830, or when he was sixty-seven years of age, his Italy.

These works have steadily extended his fame; and amid the truest enjoyment of that fame, Mr. Rogers has lived a long and honored, and, singularly for a poet, fortunate life. His wealth and position in society, not less than his wealth and position in the world of mind, have drawn around him all the distinguished characters of his time; and his house, filled from top to bottom with evidences of his taste, and of his means of indulging it, has been the resort of most of those who have given its intellectual stamp to the age. Amid the great struggles and events of that period, the wars, the revolutions, and the social contests which have communicated their fiery elements to the spirit of genius, and produced works of a like extreme character, the mind of Rogers, calm and self-balanced, has pursued its course, apparently uninfluenced by all that moved around him. With human nature, and human life in general, he sympathized; but the love of the true and beautiful in it has prevailed over the contagion of the vast and violent: he has dealt rather with the pure and touching incidents of existence, than with the passionate and the tragic. Many, on this account, have been disposed to attribute to him a want of power and greatness, forgetting that the predominating character of his taste has inevitably decided the character of his subjects, and that to these subjects he has given all the power and beauty which they were capable of. Mr. Rogers is a great master in his own department. In him taste lives as strongly as genius. He is a poetic artist. The beautiful and the refined mingle themselves with the structure as inseparably as with the material of his compositions. He knows that there is greatness in the broad champagne, with its woods and towns, as well as in the huge and splendid mountain; in the lofty but pure and placid sky, as well as in the stormy ocean. It is not the creator only of the Laocoon in all his agonies, that is a great artist--the Apollo Belvedere, and the Venus de Medicis, and the Mourning Psyche, calm in most perfect repose, or depressed with grief, equally demonstrate the hand of a master. There is often the most consummate display of genius in the stillest statue. Poussin or Claude are not the less admirable because they do not affect the robust horrors of Rubens, or the wildness of Salvator. In Rogers, the true, the pathetic, all those feelings, and sentiments, and associations, that are dear to us as life itself, are evolved with a skill that is unrivaled; and the language is elaborated to a perfection that resembles the finish of a beautiful picture, or the music to inimitable words. If we need the excitement of impetuous emotions, we would turn to Byron; if the influence of calm, and soothing, and harmonizing ones, we would sit down to Rogers. Each is eminent in his own department, each will exercise the supremacy of his genius upon us.

In the Pleasures of Memory we are forcibly reminded of Goldsmith and the Deserted Village. We feel how deeply the genius of that exquisite writer had affected the mind of Rogers in his youth. There is a striking similarity of style, of imagery, and of subject. It is not a deserted village, but a deserted mansion, which is described, and where we are led to sympathize with all that is picturesque in nature, and dear to the heart in domestic life.

"Mark yon old mansion peering through the trees, Whose hollow turret woos the whistling breeze. That casement, arched with ivy's brownest shade, First to these eyes the light of heaven conveyed. The moldering gateway shows the grass-grown court, Once the calm scene of many a simple sport; When nature pleased, for life itself was new, And the heart promised what the fancy drew.

See, through the fractured pediment revealed, Where moss inlays the rudely sculptured shield, The martin's old hereditary nest-- Long may the ruin spare its hallowed guest!