couted at the time and
violently attacked, Southey himself falling upon the poor old lady, and
devouring her, spectacles and all. She felt these attacks very much, and
could not be consoled, though Miss Edgeworth wrote a warm-hearted letter
of indignant sympathy. But Mrs. Barbauld had something in her too genuine
to be crushed, even by sarcastic criticism. She published no more, but
it was after her poem of '1811' that she wrote the beautiful ode by
which she is best known and best remembered,--the ode that Wordsworth
used to repeat and say he envied, that Tennyson has called 'sweet
verses,' of which the lines ring their tender hopeful chime like sweet
church bells on a summer evening.

Madame d'Arblay, in her old age, told Crabb Robinson that every night
she said the verses over to herself as she went to her rest. To the
writer they are almost sacred. The hand that patiently pointed out to
her, one by one, the syllables of Mrs. Barbauld's hymns for children,
that tended our childhood, as it had tended our father's, marked these
verses one night, when it blessed us for the last time.

Life, we've been long together,
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;
'Tis hard to part when friends are dear;
Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh or tear,
Then steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time.
Say not good-night, but in some brighter clime,
Bid me 'Good morning.'

Mrs. Barbauld was over seventy when she wrote this ode. A poem, called
'Octogenary Reflections,' is also very touching:--

Say ye, who through this round of eighty years
Have proved its joys and sorrows, hopes and fears;
Say what is life, ye veterans who have trod,
Step following steps, its flowery thorny road?
Enough of good to kindle strong desire;
Enough of ill to damp the rising fire;
Enough of love and fancy, joy and hope,
To fan desire and give the passions scope;
Enough of disappointment, sorrow, pain,
To seal the wise man's sentence--'All is vain.'

There is another fragment of hers in which she likens herself to a
schoolboy left of all the train, who hears no sound of wheels to bear
him to his father's bosom home. 'Thus I look to the hour when I shall
follow those that are at rest before me.' And then at last the time came
for which she longed. Her brother died, her faithful Mrs. Kenrick died,
and Mrs. Taylor, whom she loved most of all. She had consented to give
up her solitary home to spend the remain