, good weather,
And find us in the fields together.

This certainly is redolent of cheer. But he also longs for "manly,
joyous, gipsy June."

O, could I walk round the earth
With a heart to share my mirth,
With a look to love me ever,
Thoughtful much, but sullen never,
I could be content to see
June and no variety;
Loitering here, and living there,
With a book, and frugal fare,
With a finer gipsy time,
And a cuckoo in the clime,
Work at morn, and mirth at noon,
And sleep beneath the sacred moon.

In one of the items in his pleasant book, _Table-Talk_, Hunt speaks for
greater cheerfulness in English literature. He cites Suckling's famous
_A Ballad Upon a Wedding_, in which allusion is made to the once popular
belief that the sun danced on Easter-day:

Her feet beneath her petticoat,
Like little mice, stole in and out,
As if they fear'd the light;
But, Oh! She dances such a way,
No sun upon an Easter-day
Is half so fine a sight.

And then he remarks that it is a pity that we do not have, if not more
such beliefs, yet more such poetry, to stand us instead of them. "Our
poetry," he writes, "like ourselves, has too little animal spirits. It
has plenty of thought and imagination; plenty of night-thoughts, and
day-thoughts too; and in its dramatic circle, a world of action and
character. It is a poetry of the highest order and the greatest
abundance. But though not sombre--though manly, hearty, and even
luxuriant--it is certainly not a very joyous poetry. And the same may be
said of our literature in general. You do not conceive the writers to
have been cheerful men. They often recommend cheerfulness, but rather as
a good and sensible practice than as something which they feel
themselves." A little later he says, "I am only speaking of the rarity
of a certain kind of sunshine in our literature, and expressing a
natural rainy-day wish that we had a little more of it." He thinks there
should be a joyous set of elegant extracts in a score of volumes, "that
we could have at hand, like a cellaret of good wine, against April or
November weather!"

Hunt believed in a "cheerful religion." "We are for making the most of
the present world," he wrote. He had not any gloomy forebodings as to
the things that may come after death. His _London Journal_, as Frank
Carr so well states, "breathed such uniform gladness and hopefulness
that every page is pervaded with an odor of homely sanc