English poet and essayist (1743-1825)
The more history approaches to biography the more interest it excites.
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
Tales, Poems and Essays
Friendship, where it is quite sincere and affectionate, free from affectation or interested views, is one of the greatest blessings of life. It doubles our joys, and it lessens our sorrows, when we are able to pour both into the bosom of one who takes the tenderest part in all our interests, who is to us as another self. We love to communicate all our feelings; and it is in the highest degree grateful where we can do it to one who will. enter into them all; who takes an interest in everything that befalls us; before whom we can freely indulge even our little weaknesses and foibles, and show our minds as it were undressed; who will take part in all our schemes, advise us in any emergency; who rejoices in our company, and who, we are sure, thinks of us in our absence.
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
Tales, Poems and Essays
There is a cast of manners peculiar and becoming to each age, sex, and profession; one, therefore, should not throw out illiberal and common-place censures against another. Each is perfect in its kind -- a woman as a woman; a tradesman as a tradesman.
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
Tales, Poems and Essays
London is the best place in the world to cure a person of extravagance.
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
Tales, Poems and Essays
But if an acquaintance with history thus increases a rational love of our country, it also tends to check those low, illiberal, vulgar prejudices which adhere to the uninformed of every nation. Travelling will also cure them: but to. travel is not within the power of every one. There is no use, but a great deal of harm in fostering a contempt for other nations; in an arrogant assumption of superiority, and the clownish sneer of ignorance at every thing in laws, government, or manners which is not fashioned after our partial ideas and familiar usages. A well-informed person will not be apt to exclaim at every'event out of the com- mon way, that nothing like it has ever happened since the creation of the world, that such atrocities are totally unheard-of in any age or nation, — sentiments we have all of us so often heard of late on the subject of the French Revolution,—when in fact we can scarcely open a page of their history without being struck with similar and equal enormities. Indeed, party spirit is very much cooled and checked by an acquaintance with the events of past times.
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
Tales, Poems and Essays
It would be a pleasing speculation to see how the arbitrary divisions of kingdoms and provinces vary and become obsolete, and large towns flourish and fall again into ruins: while the great natural features, the mountains, rivers, and seas remain unchanged, by whatever names we please to call them, whatever empire encloses them within its temporary boundaries.
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
Tales, Poems and Essays
Knowledge, the daughter of Jupiter, descended from the skies to visit man. She found him naked and helpless, living on the spontaneous fruits of the earth, and little superior to the ox that grazed beside him. She clothed and fed him; she built him palaces; she showed him the hidden riches of the earth, and pointed with her finger the course of the stars as they rose and set in the horizon. Man became rich with her gifts, and accomplished from her conversation. In process of time Knowledge became acquainted with the schools of the philosophers; and being much taken with their theories and .their conversation, she married one of them. They had many beautiful and healthy children; but among the rest was a daughter of a different complexion from all the rest, whose name was Doubt. She grew up under many disadvantages; she had a great hesitation in her speech; a cast in her eye, which, however, was keen and piercing; and was subject to nervous tremblings. Her mother saw her with dislike: but her father, who was of the sect of the Pyrrhonists, cherished and taught her logic, in which she made a great progress. The Muse of History was much troubled with her intrusions: she would tear out whole leaves, and blot over many pages of her favorite works. With the divines her depredations were still worse: she was forbidden to enter a church; notwithstanding which, she would slip in under the surplice, and spend her time in making mouths at the priest. If she got at a library, she destroyed or blotted over the most valuable manuscripts. A most undutiful child; she was never better pleased than when she could unexpectedly trip up her mother's heels, or expose a rent or an unseemly patch in her flowing and ample garment. With mathematicians she never meddled; but in all other systems of knowledge she intruded herself, and her breath diffused a mist over the page which often left it scarcely legible. Her mother at length said to her, "Thou art my child, and I know it is decreed that while I tread this earth thou must accompany my footsteps; but thou art mortal, I am immortal; and there will come a time when I shall be freed from thy intrusion, and shall pursue my glorious track from star to star, and from system to system, without impediment and without check."
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
Tales, Poems and Essays
On Fancy's wild and roving wing I sail,
From the green borders of the peopled Earth,
And the pale Moon, her duteous fair attendant;
From solitary Mars; from the vast orb
Of Jupiter, whose huge gigantic bulk
Dances in ether like the lightest leaf;
To the dim verge, the suburbs of the system,
Where cheerless Saturn 'midst his watery moons
Girt with a lucid zone, in gloomy pomp,
Sits like an exiled monarch: fearless thence
I launch into the trackless deeps of space,
Where, burning round, ten thousand suns appear,
Of elder beam, which ask no leave to shine
Of our terrestrial star, nor borrow light
From the proud regent of our scanty day;
Sons of the morning, first-born of creation,
And only less than Him who marks their track,
And guides their fiery wheels.
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
"A Summer Evening's Meditation"
Education, it is often observed, is an expensive thing. It is so; but the paying for lessons is the smallest part of the cost.
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
Tales, Poems and Essays