Hunt had spent the first months after his release in London, but by the end of 1815, some time before the publication of _Rimini_, had settled at Hampstead, where he soon made himself a sort of self-crowned laureate of the beauties of the place, and continued to vary his critical and political labours with gossiping complimentary verses to his friends in the form both of sonnet and epistle. The gravest of the epistles is one addressed in a spirit of good-hearted loyalty to Byron in that disastrous April when, after four years spent in the full blaze of popularity and fashion, he was leaving England under the storm of obloquy aroused by the scandals attending his separation from his wife. This is in Hunt's reformed heroic couplet: the rest are in a chirruping and gossiping anapaestic sing-song which is perhaps the writer's most congenial vein. Here is a summer picture of Hampstead from a letter to Tom Moore:--
And yet how can I touch, and not linger a while, On the spot that has haunted my youth like a smile? On its fine breathing prospects, its clump-wooded glades, Dark pines, and white houses, and long-allied shades, With fields going down, where the bard lies and sees The hills up above him with roofs in the trees? Now too, while the season,--half summer, half spring,-- Brown elms and green oaks--makes one loiter and sing; And the bee's weighty murmur comes by us at noon, And the cuckoo repeats his short indolent tune, And little white clouds lie about in the sun, And the wind's in the west, and hay-making begun?--
and here an autumn night-sketch, from a letter expressing surprise that the wet weather has not brought a visit from Charles Lamb, that inveterate lover of walking in the rain:--
We hadn't much thunder and lightning, I own; But the rains might have led you to walk out of town; And what made us think your desertion still stranger, The roads were so bad, there was really no danger; At least where I live; for the nights were so groping, The rains made such wet, and the paths are so sloping, That few, unemboldened by youth or by drinking, Came down without lanthorns,--nor then without shrinking. And really, to see the bright spots come and go, As the path rose or fell, was a fanciful shew. Like fairies they seemed, pitching up from their nooks, And twinkling upon us their bright little looks.