critic, essayist, poet and writer.
Leigh Hunt was born at Southgate, London
, where his parents had settled after leaving the USA. His father Isaac, a lawyer from Philadelphia, and his mother, Mary Shewell, a merchant's daughter and a devout Quaker, had been forced to come to Britain because of their loyalist sympathies during the American War of Independence.
Oh for a seat in some poetic nook,Just hid with trees and sparkling with a brook!
The two divinest things this world has got,A lovely woman in a rural spot!
With spots of sunny openings, and with nooksTo lie and read in, sloping into brooks.
Stolen sweets are always sweeter,Stolen kisses much completer,Stolen looks are nice in chapels,Stolen, stolen, be your apples.
Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,And saw, within the moonlight in his room,Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,An Angel writing in a book of gold
"I pray thee, then,Write me as one who loves his fellow men."
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.
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, seemKeeping along it their eternal stands
and then we wake,And hear the fruitful stream lapsing alongTwixt villages, and think how we shall takeOur own calm journey on for human sake.