more intimate
acquaintance with Charles Lamb. Here is a triumvirate that will drive
into outer darkness all fits of the blues. God will be shown to be in
his heaven, and all will be well with the world.

"Hunt," says Shelley, "was one of those happy souls which are the salt
of the earth, and without whom this earth would smell like what it is--a
tomb; who is what others seem."

Hunt viewed his many misfortunes in a kindly spirit, showing us often
what fine things may come to us out of human suffering. It is a
benediction, a peace-compelling exercise to spend an evening with Hunt.
His optimism is catching. One cannot get away from it. He writes of
Samuel Johnson: "How much good and entertainment did not the very
necessities of such a man help to produce us." This is a saying we may
apply to Hunt himself.

_Leigh Hunt's London Journal_, one of his best publications, states that
its object is "Pleasure ... the pleasure recommended alike by the most
doubting experiment, and the most trusting faith--that of making the
utmost of this green and golden world, the smallest particles of whose
surface we have not yet learned to turn to account--that of profiting
alike from the toil that is incumbent on us, and from 'the lilies of the
valley that toil not, neither do they spin.'... We say nothing we do not
think, and manifest no feelings which are not those of our daily life
and our most habitual enjoyments, our talisman against trouble, and our
best reward for exertion--a leaf, a flower, a fine passage of music, or
poetry, or painting, a belief in a thousand capabilities of earth and
man, give us literally as much delight as we say they do. We should not
otherwise have been able to get through 'a sea of troubles,' not to
recommend as we do the loving light that has saved us."

Hunt's motto for his _Indicator_, a publication praised by Charles Lamb,
is a cheerful one: "A dram of sweet is worth a pound of sour." It was
taken from Spenser, one of Hunt's favorites, and was suggested by Mrs.
Novello, mother of Mary Cowden Clarke, as we are told in _Letters to an
Enthusiast_: "By the way, did you know that my mother was the godmother
of the 'Indicator?' She suggested its name, and Leigh Hunt adopted it,
and the passage as a motto which she had pointed out as offering ground
for a good title."

Hunt could get cheerfulness out of a pebble even. "Strike it," he says,
"and you will get something out of him: warm his heart, and out com