Anna Laetitia Barbauld Quotes

If e'er thy breast with freedom glow'd, And spurn'd a tyrant's chain, Let not thy strong oppressive force
A free-born mouse detain.

The cheerful light, the vital air, Are blessings widely given; Let nature's commoners enjoy
The common gifts of heaven.The well-taught philosophic mind
To all compassion gives; Casts round the world an equal eye, And feels for all that lives.<p>If mind, as ancient sages taught, A never dying flame, Still shifts thro' matter's varying forms, In every form the same, Beware, lest in the worm you crush A brother's soul you find; And tremble lest thy luckless hand Dislodge a kindred mind.

Let us confess a truth, humiliating perhaps to human pride;—a very small part only of the opinions of the coolest philosopher are the result of fair reasoning; the rest are formed by his education, his temperament, by the age in which he lives, by trains of thought directed to a particular track through some accidental association—in short, by prejudice.

Oh! hear a pensive captive's prayer, For liberty that sighs; And never let thine heart be shut
Against the prisoner's cries.

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

This dead of midnight is the noon of thought,
And Wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars.

So fades a summer cloud away; So sinks the gale when storms are o’er;
So gently shuts the eye of day; So dies a wave along the shore.

It is, in truth, the most absurd of all suppositions, that a human being can be educated, or even nourished and brought up, without imbibing numberless prejudices from every thing which passes around him.

O gently guide my pilgrim feet
To find thy hermit cell;
Where in some pure and equal sky
Beneath thy soft indulgent eye
The modest virtues dwell.

It would be difficult to determine whether the age is growing better or worse; for I think our plays are growing like sermons, and our sermons like plays.

With Thee in shady solitudes I walk,
With Thee in busy, crowded cities talk,
In every creature own Thy forming power,
In each event Thy providence adore.

It is to hope, tho' hope were lost.

I read his awful name, emblazon'd high
With golden letters on th' illumin'd sky.

Man is the nobler growth our realms supply,
And souls are ripen'd in our northern sky.

Flowers, the sole luxury which nature knew,
In Eden's pure and guiltless garden grew.[…]
Gay without toil, and lovely without art,
They spring to cheer the sense, and glad the heart.