Leigh Hunt

James Henry Leigh Hunt (October 19 1784 – August 28 1859) was an English poet and essayist.

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• Jenny kiss'd 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!
  • Poem Rondeau.

• Oh for a seat in some poetic nook,
  Just hid with trees and sparkling with a brook!
  • Politics and Poetics.

• The two divinest things this world has got,
  A lovely woman in a rural spot!
  • Poem The Story of Rimini, iii, 257.

• With spots of sunny openings, and with nooks
  To lie and read in, sloping into brooks.
  • The Story of Rimini.

• She dropped her glove, to prove his love, then looked at him and smiled;
  He bowed, and in a moment leaped among the lions wild:
  The leap was quick, return was quick, he has regained his place,
  Then threw the glove, but not with love, right in the lady's face.
  "By God!" said Francis, "rightly done!" and he rose from where he sat:
  "No love," quoth he, "but vanity, sets love a task like that."
  • Poem The Glove and the Lions.

• Stolen sweets are always sweeter,
  Stolen kisses much completer,
  Stolen looks are nice in chapels,
  Stolen, stolen, be your apples.
  • Poem Song of Fairies Robbing an Orchard.

• The same people who can deny others everything are famous for refusing themselves nothing.
  • Table Talk (1851).

• 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
  • Abou Ben Adhem
• "I pray thee, then,
  Write me as one who loves his fellow men".
  • Abou Ben Adhem
• And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.
  • Abou Ben Adhem

• 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.
  • A Thought of the Nile
• 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.
  • A Thought of the Nile

The Town: Its Memorable Characters and Events

• ...fishes do not roar; they cannot express any sound of suffering; and therefore the angler chooses to think they do not suffer, more than it is convenient for him to fancy. Now it is a poor sport that depends for its existence on the want of a voice in the sufferer, and of imagination in the sportsman. (Rev. ed., London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1889, pp114-5).

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• There are two worlds: the world that we can measure with line and rule, and the world we feel with our hearts and imagination.