ssed, in the summer hours,
A brood of Nature's minstrels chirp and fly,
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky."

There are pretty snatches of a Southern May in Hunt's poem of "Rimini,"
where

"sky, earth, and sea
Breathe like a bright-eyed face that laughs out openly.
'T is Nature full of spirits, waked and springing:
The birds to the delicious tune are singing,
Darting with freaks and snatches up and down,
Where the light woods go seaward from the town;
While happy faces striking through the green
Of leafy roads at every turn are seen;
And the far ships, lifting their sails of white
Like joyful hands, come up with scattery light,
Come gleaming up true to the wished-for day,
And chase the whistling brine, and swirl into the bay."

This does not sound as if it came from the prince of cockneys; and I
have always felt a certain regard for Leigh Hunt, too, by reason of the
tender story which he gives of the little garden, "_mio picciol orto_,"
that he established during his two years of prisonhood.[34]

But, after all, there was no robustness in his rural spirit,--nothing
that makes the cheek tingle, as if a smart wind had smitten it. He was
born to handle roses without thorns; I think that with a pretty boudoir,
on whose table every morning a pretty maid should arrange a pretty
nosegay, and with a pretty canary to sing songs in a gilded cage, and
pretty gold-fish to disport in a crystal vase, and basted partridges for
dinner, his love for the country would have been satisfied. He loved
Nature as a sentimental boy loves a fine woman of twice his
years,--sighing himself away in pretty phrases that flatter, but do not
touch her; there is nothing to remind, even, of the full, abounding,
fiery, all-conquering love with which a full-grown man meets and marries
a yielding maiden.

In poor John Keats, however, there _is_ something of this; and under its
heats he consumed away. For ripe, joyous outburst of all rural
fancies,--for keen apprehension of what most takes hold of the
susceptibilities of a man who loves the country,--for his coinage of all
sweet sounds of birds, all murmur of leaves, all riot and blossoming of
flowers, into fragrant verse,--he was without a peer in his day. It is
not that he is so true to natural phases in his descriptive epithets,
not that he sees all, not that he has heard all; but his heart has drunk
the incense of it,