Leigh Hunt's Relations with Byron, Shelley and Keats — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Leigh Hunt's Relations with Byron, Shelley and Keats
John Stuart Mill · en
This admiration, expressed before Keats had met Hunt, was due to the
influence of the Clarke family and to Keats's acquaintance with _The
Examiner_, which he saw regularly during his school days at Enfield and
which he continued to borrow from Clarke during his medical
apprenticeship. Clarke later showed to Leigh Hunt two or three of Keats's
poems. Of the reception of one of them (_How Many Bards Gild the Lapses of
Time_) Clarke said:
"I could not but anticipate that Hunt would speak encouragingly, and
indeed approvingly, of the compositions--written, too, by a youth
under age; but my partial spirit was not prepared for the
unhesitating and prompt admiration which broke forth before he had
read twenty lines of the first poem."[91]
Hunt invited Keats to visit him. Of this first meeting between the two
men, Clarke wrote:
"That was a red letter day in the young poet's life, and one which
will never fade with me while memory lasts. The character and
expression of Keats's features would arrest even the casual passenger
in the street; and now they were wrought to a tone of animation that
I could not but watch with interest, knowing what was in store for
him from the bland encouragement, and Spartan deference in attention,
with fascinating conversational eloquence, that he was to encounter
and receive.... The interview, which stretched into three 'morning
calls', was the prelude to many after-scenes and saunterings about
Caen Wood and its neighborhood; for Keats was suddenly made a
familiar of the household, and was always welcomed."[92]
Hunt's account of the meeting is as follows:
"I shall never forget the impression made upon me by the exuberant
specimens of genuine though young poetry that were laid before me,
and the promise of which was seconded by the fine fervid countenance
of the writer. We became intimate on the spot, and I found the young
poet's heart as warm as his imagination. We read and we walked
together, and used to write verse of an evening upon a given subject.
No imaginative pleasure was left untouched by us, or unenjoyed; from
the recollections of the bards and patriots of old, to the luxury of
a summer rain at our window, or the clicking of the coal in the
winter-time. Not long afterwards, having the pleasure of entertaining
at dinner Mr. Godwin, Mr. Hazlitt, and Mr. Basil Montagu, I showed
the verses of my young friend, and they were pronounced to be as
extraordinary as I thought them."[93]