erse. Nor are Hunt's lyrics
particularly strong. His best thing by far is the charming trifle (the
heroine being, it has been said and also denied, Mrs. Carlyle) which he
called a "rondeau," though it is not one.

Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in:
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put _that_ in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old--but add,
Jenny kissed me.

Even here it may be noticed that though the last four lines could hardly
be bettered, the second couplet is rather weak. Some of Leigh Hunt's
sonnets, especially that which he wrote on the Nile in rivalry with
Shelley and Keats, are very good.

It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,
Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream;
And times and things, as in that vision, seem
Keeping along it their eternal stands;--
Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd-bands
That roamed through the young earth, the glory extreme
Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,
_The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands._
Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong,
As of a world left empty of its throng,
And the void weighs on us; and then we wake,
And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
'Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
Our own calm journey on for human sake.

This was written in 1818, and I think it will be admitted that the
italicised line is a rediscovery of a cadence which had been lost for
centuries, and which has been constantly borrowed and imitated since.

Every now and then he had touches of something much above his usual
style, as in the concluding lines of the whimsical "flyting," as the
Scotch poets of the fifteenth century would have called it, between the
Man and the Fish:

Man's life is warm, glad, sad, 'twixt loves and graves,
Boundless in hope, honoured with pangs austere,
Heaven-gazing; and his angel-wings he craves:
The fish is swift, small-needing, vague yet clear,
A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves,
Quickened with touches of transporting fear.

As a rule, however, his poetry has little or nothing of this kind, and
he will hold his place in the English _corpus poetarum_, first, because
he was an associate of better poets than himself; secondly, because he
invented a me