How strangely unnatural it seems when Fate's heavy hand falls upon quiet
and common-place lives, changing the tranquil routine of every day into
the solemnities and excitements of terror and tragedy! It was after
their removal to Stoke Newington that the saddest of all blows fell
upon this true-hearted woman. Her husband's hypochondria deepened and
changed, and the attacks became so serious that her brother and his
family urged her anxiously to leave him to other care than her own. It
was no longer safe for poor Mr. Barbauld to remain alone with his wife,
and her life, says Mrs. Le Breton, was more than once in peril. But, at
first, she would not hear of leaving him; although on more than one
occasion she had to fly for protection to her brother close by.
There is something very touching in the patient fidelity with which Mrs.
Barbauld tried to soothe the later sad disastrous years of her husband's
life. She must have been a woman of singular nerve and courage to endure
as she did the excitement and cruel aberrations of her once gentle and
devoted companion. She only gave in after long resistance.
'An alienation from me has taken possession of his mind,' she says, in a
letter to Mrs. Kenrick; 'my presence seems to irritate him, and I must
resign myself to a separation from him who has been for thirty years the
partner of my heart, my faithful friend, my inseparable companion.' With
her habitual reticence, she dwells no more on that painful topic, but
goes on to make plans for them both, asks her old friend to come and
cheer her in her loneliness; and the faithful Betsy, now a widow with
grown-up step-children, ill herself, troubled by deafness and other
infirmities, responds with a warm heart, and promises to come, bringing
the comfort with her of old companionship and familiar sympathy. There
is something very affecting in the loyalty of the two aged women
stretching out their hands to each other across a whole lifetime. After
her visit Mrs. Barbauld writes again:--
'He is now at Norwich, and I hear very favourable accounts of his health
and spirits; he seems to enjoy himself very much amongst his old friends
there, and converses among them with his usual animation. There are no
symptoms of violence or of depression; so far is favourable; but this
cruel alienation from me, in which my brother is included, still remains
deep-rooted, and whether he will ever change in this point Heaven only
knows. The medical men fear he will not: if so, my dear friend, what
remains for me but to resign myself to the will of Heaven, and to think
with pleasure that every day brings me nearer a period which naturally
cannot be very far off, and at which this as well as every temporal
affliction must terminate?
'"Anything but this!" is the cry of weak mortals when afflicted; and
sometimes I own I am inclined to make it mine; but I will check myself.'
But while she was hoping still, a fresh outbreak of the malady occurred.
He, poor soul, weary of his existence, put an end to his sufferings: he
was found lifeless in the New River. Lucy Aikin quotes a Dirge found
among her aunt's papers after her death:--
Pure Spirit, O where art thou now?
O whisper to my soul,
O let some soothening thought of thee
This bitter grief control.
'Tis not for thee the tears I shed,
Thy sufferings now are o'er.
The sea is calm, the tempest past,
On that eternal shore.
No more the storms that wrecked thy peace
Shall tear that gentle breast,
Nor summer's rage, nor winter's cold
That poor, poor frame molest.
* * * * *
Farewell! With honour, peace, and love,
Be that dear memory blest,
Thou hast no tears for me to shed,
When I too am at rest.
But her time of rest was not yet come, and she lived for seventeen years
after her husband. She was very brave, she did not turn from the
sympathy of her friends, she endured her loneliness with courage, she
worked to distract her mind. Here is a touching letter addressed to Mrs.
Taylor, of Norwich, in which she says:--'A thousand thanks for your kind
letter, still more for the very short visit that preceded it. Though
short--too short--it has left indelible impressions on my mind. My
heart has truly had communion with yours; your sympathy has been balm to
it; and I feel that there is _now_ no one on earth to whom I could pour
out that heart more readily.... I am now sitting alone again, and feel
like a person who has been sitting by a cheerful fire, not sensible at
the time of the temperature of the air; but the fire removed, he finds
the season is still winter. Day after day passes, and I do not know what
to do with my time; my mind has no energy nor power of application.'
How much she felt her loneliness appears again and again from one
passage and another. Then she struggled against discouragement; she
took to her pen again. To Mrs. Kenrick she writes:--'I intend to pay my
letter debts; not much troubling my head whether I have anything to say
or not; yet to you my heart has always something to say: it always
recognises you as among the dearest of its friends; and while it feels
that new impressions are made with difficulty and early effaced,
retains, and ever will retain, I trust beyond this world, those of our
early and long-tried affection.'
She set to work again, trying to forget her heavy trials. It was during
the first years of her widowhood that she published her edition of the
British novelists in some fifty volumes. There is an opening chapter to
this edition upon novels and novel-writing, which is an admirable and
most interesting essay upon fiction, beginning from the very earliest
times.
In 1811 she wrote her poem on the King's illness, and also the longer
poem which provoked such indignant comments at the time. It describes
Britain's rise and luxury, warns her of the dangers of her unbounded
ambition and unjustifiable wars:--
Arts, arms, and wealth destroy the fruits they bring;
Commerce, like beauty, knows no second spring.
Her ingenuous youth from Ontario's shore who visits the ruins of London
is one of the many claimants to the honour of having suggested Lord
Macaulay's celebrated New Zealander:--
Pensive and thoughtful shall the wanderers greet
Each splendid square and still untrodden street,
Or of some crumbling turret, mined by time,
The broken stairs with perilous step shall climb,
Thence stretch their view the wide horizon round,
By scattered hamlets trace its ancient bound,
And, choked no more with fleets, fair Thames survey
Through reeds and sedge pursue his idle way.
It is impossible not to admire the poem, though it is stilted and not to
the present taste. The description of Britain as it now is and as it
once was is very ingenious:--
Where once Bonduca whirled the scythèd car,
And the fierce matrons raised the shriek of war,
Light forms beneath transparent muslin float,
And tutor'd voices swell the artful note;
Light-leaved acacias, and the shady plane,
And spreading cedars grace the woodland reign.
The poem is forgotten now, though it was scouted 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 remaining years of her life in the
home of her adopted son Charles, now married, and a father; but it was
while she was on a little visit to her sister-in-law, Mrs. Aikin, that
the summons came, very swiftly and peacefully, as she sat in her chair
one day. Her nephew transcribed these, the last lines she ever wrote:--
'Who are you?'
'Do you not know me? have you not expected me?'
'Whither do you carry me?'
'Come with me and you shall know.'
'The way is dark.'
'It is well trodden.'
'Yes, in the forward track.'
'Come along.'
'Oh! shall I there see my beloved ones? Will they welcome me, and will
they know me? Oh, tell me, tell me; thou canst tell me.'
'Yes, but thou must come first.'
'Stop a little; keep thy hand off till thou hast told me.'
'I never wait.'
'Oh! shall I see the warm sun again in my cold grave?'
'Nothing is there that can feel the sun.'
'Oh, where then?'
'Come, I say.'
One may acknowledge the great progress which people have made since Mrs.
Barbauld's day in the practice of writing prose and poetry, in the art
of expressing upon paper the thoughts which are in most people's minds.
It is (to use a friend's simile) like playing upon the piano--everybody
now learns to play upon the piano, and it is certain that the modest
performances of the ladies of Mrs. Barbauld's time would scarcely meet
with the attention now, which they then received. But all the same, the
stock of true feeling, of real poetry, is not increased by the increased
volubility of our pens; and so when something comes to us that is real,
that is complete in pathos or in wisdom, we still acknowledge the gift,
and are grateful for it.
_MISS EDGEWORTH._
1767-1849.
'Exceeding wise, fairspoken, and persuading.'--_Hen. VIII._