Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-FameColvin, Sidney
General
Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame
Colvin, Sidney
Keats, John, 1795-1821; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
not got in converting its backyard into a garden of shrubs and flowers.
Very early in life Hunt had been received into a family called Kent at
the instance of an elder daughter who greatly admired him. Not long
afterwards he engaged himself to her younger sister, then almost a
child, and married her soon after the _Examiner_ was started. She proved
a prolific, thriftless woman and ill housekeeper, but through all the
rubs and pinches of his after years he was ever an affectionate husband
and father. His wife was allowed to be with him in prison, and there
they received the visits of many friends old and new. Liberal statesmen,
philosophers, and writers, including characters so divers as Bentham and
Byron, Brougham and Hazlitt, James Mill and Miss Edgeworth, Tom Moore
and Wilkie the painter, pressed to offer this victim of political
persecution their sympathy and society. Charles Lamb and his sister were
the most constant of all his visitors. Tom Moore, who both before and
after the sentence on the brothers Hunt managed in his series of verse
skits, _The Twopenny Post Bag_, to go on playing with impunity the game
of Prince-Regent-baiting,--the light-hearted Tom Moore joined in deepest
earnest the chorus of sympathy with the prisoners:--
Yet go--for thoughts as blessed as the air
Of Spring or Summer flowers await you there:
Thoughts such as He, who feasts his courtly crew
In rich conservatories, _never_ knew;
Pure self-esteem--the smiles that light within--
The Zeal, whose circling charities begin
With the few lov'd ones Heaven has plac'd it near,
And spread, till all Mankind are in its sphere;
The Pride, that suffers without vaunt or plea,
And the fresh Spirit, that can warble free,
Through prison-bars, its hymn to Liberty!
Among ardent young men who brought their tributes was Cowden Clarke with
a basket of fruit and flowers from his father's garden; and this was
followed up by a weekly offering in the same kind. 'Libertas, the loved
Libertas,' was the name found for Hunt by such fond young spirits and
adopted by Keats.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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