Luther Albertus Brewer

“ There is not a more admirable trait in one’s character than that of cheerfulness. Combined with that other virtue named by Stevenson, gentleness, and what more is needed to make a companionable and a beloved man.
These two attributes were possessed in an emphatic way both by Stevenson and by Leigh Hunt. That’s why some of us are so fond of Hunt. That’s why he is growing in esteem as he is becoming better known to lovers and students of the literature produced in England during the first half of the nineteenth century. ”

“ Hunt’s gentleness and cheerfulness are shown in his essays, as well as in his poetry. Perhaps none of his essays evidences these qualities of his heart and mind more forcibly than “A Day by the Fire,” which was written for the Reflector in 1812, when he was twenty-eight years of age. “I am one of those that delight in a fireside,” he begins, at once thereby telling us that he loves kindliness and cheerfulness. For no man who loves a fire on the hearth, especially a fire made of old wood, can be a sour old curmudgeon. It is as impossible as it is for one not to love a sweet little girl. ”

“ In Hunt’s correspondence, Dickens saw evidence that he was “sometimes over-clouded with the shadow of affliction, but more often bright and hopeful, and at all times sympathetic: taking a keen delight in all beautiful things—in the exhaustless world of books and art, in the rising genius of young authors, in the immortal language of music, in trees and flowers, and old memorial nooks of London and its suburbs ”

“ It is a poetry of the highest order and the greatest abundance. But though not sombre—though manly, hearty, and even luxuriant—it is certainly not a very joyous poetry. And the same may be said of our literature in general. You do not conceive the writers to have been cheerful men. They often recommend cheerfulness, but rather as a good and sensible practice than as something which they feel themselves. ”

“ Speaking of Hunt’s Autobiography, a book second only in interest to Boswell’s Johnson said Carlyle, this caustic writer had the grace to say that the reader might find in that book “the image of a gifted, gentle, patient, and valiant human soul, as it buffets its way through the billows of time, and will not drown though often in danger; cannot be drowned, but conquers and leaves a track of radiance behind it.” ”

“ Hunt and Stevenson saw in their lives from day to day only the bright hours.
And this is the message that The Brewers would send this Christmas time to their friends: “Gentleness and cheerfulness are the perfect virtues.” Only the bright hours are the ones we should see. ”

“ A heart and soul so gifted could not but share largely in the happiness with which the Divine Ruler of the Universe has compensated our sorrows; and he had loving hearts about him to the last, to sweeten all. ”

“ The first shapes the human being to beauty and imagination, the latter to love and immortality. The first perfects him individually, the latter to endless companionship. Platonism lifts the philosopher towards heaven: Christianity takes up the whole human race, and puts them there.
I should like to be a worshiper in a Christian temple, in which whatsoever is good and beautiful should be held, for those reasons, to be divinely true; in which Plato’s unmalignant evil should be the ground for Christ’s all-benevolent good to stand upon ”

“ Exercise is recommended as a promoter of cheerfulness. Such a high opinion of the value of exercise was held by Plato that he maintained it was a cure even for a wounded conscience. In the same article Hunt suggests that one should not want money for money’s sake. ”

“ In writing of his father after his death, Thornton evidently had in mind this ungenerous act of Dickens [Pg 8] when he penned these sentences: “His consideration, his sympathy with what was gay and pleasurable, his avowed doctrine of cultivating cheerfulness were manifest on the surface, and could only be appreciated by those who knew him in society, most probably even exaggerated as salient traits, on which he himself insisted with a sort of gay and ostentatious wilfulness. ”

“ A little later he says, [Pg 16] “I am only speaking of the rarity of a certain kind of sunshine in our literature, and expressing a natural rainy-day wish that we had a little more of it.” He thinks there should be a joyous set of elegant extracts in a score of volumes, “that we could have at hand, like a cellaret of good wine, against April or November weather!”
Hunt believed in a “cheerful religion.” “We are for making the most of the present world,” he wrote. He had not any gloomy forebodings as to the things that may come after death. ”

“ When his wife wrote him that after paying for a loaf of bread she would not have a penny in her pocket, Hunt writes her in a cheerful way. Some of us with a less keen perception of cheerful situations, or with less ability to surmount calamities would find it rather difficult to be as cheerful as Hunt seemed to be. ”

“ Hunt at Epsom.
Heaven seems to afford us consolatory thought, and show to us almost certain glimpses of happiness, in proportion as we do its work with cheerfulness:—and what work is more properly the work of heaven than that of helping one another to bear our burdens and strengthen our patience?—Letter, Florence, 4 Nov., 1824, to Bebs, his wife’s sister.
He writes Mrs. Hunt, his “Dearest Molly mine,” thus cheerfully:
I have got the twenty guineas, and settled with Hyatt ”