Revolution and Romanticism

JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT

The Story of Rimini 1816

Essayist, journalist, editor (of the Examiner, Indicator, Liberal), Hunt had much to do with establishing the reputations of Keats and Shelley, and collaborated at various times with Hazlitt and Byron. Rimini, relating the story of Dante's tragic lovers Paolo and Francesca, is his major poem, and important too for the post-Wordsworthian literary criticism of its Preface.

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There’s apt to be, at conscious times like these
An affectation of a bright-eyed ease,
An air of something quite serene and sure,
As if to seem so, was to be, secure;
With this the lovers met, with this they spoke,
With this they sat down to the self-same book,
And Paulo, by degrees, gently embraced
With one permitted arm her lovely waist;
And both their cheeks, like peaches on a tree,
Leaned with a touch together, thrillingly;
And o’er the book they hung, and nothing said,
And every lingering page grew longer as they read.
(page 77)

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Poetry of the 1890s