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.' |