e the
genial sparks that shall gladden your hearth, and put hot dishes on your
table." The brook singeth, states Coleridge in that beautiful stanza:

A voice of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.

And Hunt observes it would not sing so well without the stone.

Then in his light, airy way he calls our attention to that exquisite
little poem by Wordsworth on the fair maiden who died by the river Dove:

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye;
Fair as the star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

And he asks if anything can express a lovelier loneliness, than the
violet half hidden by the mossy stone.

Hunt finds other gentle qualities in a stone, citing the opening lines
of Keats's _Hyperion_, where he describes the dethroned monarch of the
gods, sitting in his exile:

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and Eve's one star,
Sate gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone.

Nothing certainly can be more quiet than a stone. It utters not a
syllable nor a sigh.

Shakespeare had the knack of seeing power in things gentle:

Weariness
Can snore upon the flint, when restive sloth
Finds the down pillow hard.

"If you are melancholy for the first time, you will find upon a little
inquiry that others have been melancholy many times, and yet are
cheerful now," Hunt writes in the _Indicator_. "If you are melancholy
many times, recollect that you have got over all those times."

This is good advice, and true. 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. Certes, Hunt never craved money for the purpose of
hoarding it. Nearly all his life he needed money acutely, but when a
generous sum came into his possession he did not know how to keep it;
nay, he did not know how to use it properly. He was always "hard up,"
simply because he was a child in money matters. Withal, he was
optimistic and cheerful, even to the extent of remaining at home because
he did not possess the means of purchasing presentable clothing. When
his wife wrote him that after paying for a loaf of bread she would not
have a penny in her pocket, H