English poet and essayist (1743-1825)
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
Friends are most easily acquired in youth, but they are likewise most easily lost.
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
Tales, Poems and Essays
It has been made a question whether friendship can subsist among the vicious. If by vicious be meant those who are void of the social, generous, and affectionate feelings, it is most certain it cannot; because these make the very essence of it. But it is very possible for persons to possess fine feelings, without that steady principle which alone constitutes virtue; and it does not appear why such may not feel a real friendship. It will not indeed be so likely to be lasting, and is often succeeded by bitter enmities.
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
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
Geography is best learned along with history; for if the first explains history, the latter gives interest to geography, which without it is but a dry list of names.
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"
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
London is the best place in the world to cure a person of extravagance.
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
Tales, Poems and Essays