The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1860. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... but because he had a divine and loving heart; and wherever such greatness has appeared, there has divineness appeared also, as surely as the same sunshine of heaven is on the mountain tops of east and west. Such are the doctrines, and such only, accompanied by expositions of the beauties and wonders of God's great book of the universe, which will be preached in the temples of the earth, including those of our beloved country, England, its beautiful old ivied turrets and their green neighbourhoods, then, for the first time, thoroughly uncontradicted and heavenly; with not a sound in them more terrible than the stormy yet sweet organ, analogous to the beneficent winds and tempests; and no thought of here or hereafter, that can disturb the quiet aspect of the graves, or the welcome of the new-born darlings And that such a consummation may come slowly but surely, without intermission in its advance, and with not an injury to a living soul, will be the last prayer, as it must needs be among the Litest words, of the author of this book. CHAPTER XXVL LIFE DRAWING TOWARDS ITS CLOSE. When I closed the preceding chapter, which terminated the first edition of this biography, I did not think it would be followed by one like the present. I fancied I should go on, living as I did before, reading and writing as usual, working placidly rather than otherwise to the last, reckoning confidently on my being survived by every one of my family, old as well as young, and closing my days, if with no great applause from such of my fellow-creatures as had read me or heard of me, yet with no reproach from any of them, and something like regret from all. This latter portion of my life, trying soever as much of the rest of it had been, has turned out to be the most trying of the whole. It h...