And she became companion of his thought; Silence her gentleness before him brought, Society her sense, reading her books, Music her voice, every sweet thing her looks, Which sometimes seemed, when he sat fixed awhile, To steal beneath his eyes with upward smile; And did he stroll into some lonely place, Under the trees, upon the thick soft grass, How charming, would he think, to see her here! How heightened then, and perfect would appear The two divinest things this world has got, A lovely woman in a rural spot! The first few lines are skilfully modulated, and in an ordinary domestic theme might be palatable enough; but what a couplet, good heavens! for the last. At the climax, Hunt's version of Dante is an example of milk-and-water in conditions where milk-and-water is sheer poison:-- As thus they sat, and felt with leaps of heart Their colour change, they came upon the part Where fond Genevra, with her flame long nurst, Smiled upon Launcelot when he kissed her first:-- That touch, at last, through every fibre slid; And Paulo turned, scarce knowing what he did, Only he felt he could no more dissemble, And kissed her, mouth to mouth, all in a tremble. The taste, we see, which guided Hunt so well in appreciating the work of others could betray him terribly in original composition. The passages of light narrative in _Rimini_ are often vivacious and pleasant enough, those of nature description genuinely if not profoundly felt, and written with an eye on the object: but they are the only tolerable things in the poem. Hunt's idea of a true poetical style was to avoid everything strained, stilted, and conventional, and to lighten the stress of his theme with familiar graces and pleasantries in the manner of his beloved Ariosto. But he did not realize that while any style, from that of the _Book of Job_ to that of Wordsworth's _Idiot Boy_, may become poetical if only there is strength and intensity of feeling behind it, nothing but the finest social instinct and tradition can impart the tact for such light conversational graces as he attempted, and that to treat a theme of high tragic passion in the tone and vocabulary of a suburban tea-party is intolerable. Contemporaries, welcoming as a relief any change from the stale conventions and tarnished glitter of eighteenth century poetic rhythm and diction, and perhaps sated for the moment with the rush and thrill of new romantic and exotic sensation they had owed in recent years, first to Scott's metrical tales of the Border and the Highlands, then to Byron's of Greece and the Levant,--contemporaries found something fresh and homefelt in Leigh Hunt's _Rimini_, and sentimental ladies and gentlemen wept over the sorrows of the hero and heroine as though they had been their own. No less a person than Byron, to whom the poem was dedicated, writes to Moore:--'Leigh Hunt's poem is a devilish good one--quaint here