Described by a contemporary as "a fresh and airy essayist," (James Henry) Leigh Hunt was also a poet, critic, and editor of the British literary journal the Examiner (1808-1821), which published early works by poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In his Autobiography (1850), Hunt wrote that he had spent the greater part of his life "reading or writing, ailing, jesting, reflecting, rarely stirring from home but to walk, interested in public events, in the progress of society, in the 'New Reformation' (most deeply), in things great and small, in a print, in a plaster-cast, in a hand-organ, in the stars, in the sun to which the sun is hastening, in the flower on my table, in the fly on my paper while I write."

In the first part of "Spring" (1824), Hunt reflects on the "beautiful word" itself, comparing it to the Italian word for spring, primavera. His thoughts then turn to mortality and our obligation to "behave ourselves" on earth in return for this "promise of a renewed year."

Spring

by Leigh Hunt

This morning as we sat at breakfast, thinking of our present subject, with our eyes fixed on a set of the British Poets, which stand us instead of a prospect, there came by the window, from a child's voice, a cry of "Wallflowers." There had just been a shower; sunshine had followed it; and the rain, the sun, the boy's voice, and the flowers, came all so prettily together upon the subject we were thinking of, that in taking one of his roots, we could not help fancying we had received a present from Nature herself--with a penny for the bearer. There were thirty lumps of buds on this penny root; their beauty was yet to come; but the promise was there--the new life--the Spring--and the rain-drops were on them, as if the sweet goddess had dipped her hand in some fountain, and sprinkled them for us by way of message; as who should say, "April and I are coming."

What a beautiful word is Spring! At least one fancies so, knowing the meaning of it, and being used to identify it with so many pleasant things. An Italian might find it harsh; and object to the Sp and the terminating consonant; but if he were a proper Italian, a man of fancy, the worthy countryman of Petrarch and Ariosto, we would convince him that the word was an excellent good word, crammed as full of beauty as a bud--and that S had the whistling of the brooks in it, p and r the force and roughness of whatsoever is animated and picturesque, ing the singing of the birds, and the whole word the suddenness and salience of all that is lively, sprouting, and new--Spring, Spring-time, a Spring-green, a Spring of water--to Spring--Springal, a word for a young man in old (that is, ever new) English poetry, which with many other words has gone out, because the youthfulness of our hearts has gone out--to come back with better times, and the nine-hundredth number of the work before us.

If our Italian, being very unlike an Italian, ill-natured and not open to pleasant conviction, should still object to our word, we would grow uncourteous in turn, and swear it was a better word than his Prima-vera--which is what he calls Spring--Prima-vera, that is to say, the first Vera, or Ver of the Latins, the Veer . . . or Ear of the Greeks; and what that means, nobody very well knows. But why Prima-Vera? and what is Seconda, or second Vera? The word is too long and lazy, as well as obscure, compared with our brisk, little, potent, obvious, and leaping Spring--full of all fountains, buds, birds, sweetbriars, and sunbeams.

"Leaping, like wanton kids in pleasant spring,"

says the poet, speaking of the "wood-born people" that flocked about fair Serena. How much better the word spring suits here with the word leaping, than if it had been prima-vera! How much more sudden and starting, like the boundings of the kids! Prima-vera is a beautiful word; let us not gainsay it; but it is more suitable to the maturity, than to the very springing of spring, as its first syllable would pretend. So long and comparatively languid a word ought to belong to that side of the season which is next to summer. Ver, the Latin word, is better--or rather Greek word; for, as we have shown before, it comes from the Greek--like almost every good thing in Latin. It is a pity one does not know what it means; for the Greeks had "good meanings" (as Sir Hugh Evans would say); and their Ver, Feer, or Ear, we may be sure, meant something pleasant--possibly the rising of the sap; or something connected with the new air; or with love; for etymologists, with their happy facilities, might bring it from the roots of such words. Ben Jonson has made a beautiful name of its adjective (Earinos, vernal) for the heroine of his "Sad Shepherd"--

"Earine,
Who had her very being, and her name,
With the first knots, or buddings of the Spring;
Born with the primrose and the violet,
Or earliest roses blown; when Cupid smiled,
And Venus led the Graces out to dance;
And all the flowers and sweets in Nature's lap
Leap'd out."

The lightest thoughts have their roots in gravity, and the most fugitive colours of the world are set off by the mighty back-ground of eternity. One of the greatest pleasures of so light and airy a thing as the vernal season arises from the consciousness that the world is young again; that the spring has come round, that we shall not all cease, and be no world. Nature has begun again, and not begun for nothing. One fancies somehow that she could not have the heart to put a stop to us in April or May. She may pluck away a poor little life here and there; nay, many blossoms of youth--but not all--not the whole garden of life. She prunes, but does not destroy. If she did--if she were in the mind to have done with us--to look upon us as an experiment not worth going on with, as a set of ungenial and obstinate compounds which refused to cooperate in her sweet designs, and could not be made to answer in the working--depend upon it she would take pity on our incapability and bad humours, and conveniently quash us in some dismal, sullen winter's day, just at the natural dying of the year, most likely in November; for Christmas is a sort of Spring itself, a winter-flowering.

Concluded on page two