Page:The works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld volume 1.djvu/56

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11th of November, 1808, in the event by which she became a widow. She has touchingly alluded, in her poem of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, to

—"that sad death whence most affection bleeds,
Which sickness, only of the soul, precedes."

And though the escape of a sufferer from the most melancholy of human maladies could not in itself be a subject of rational regret, her spirits were deeply wounded, both by the severe trials through which she had previously passed, and by the mournful void which always succeeds the removal of an object of long and deep, however painful, interest. An affecting Dirge will be found among her poems, which records her feelings on this occasion. She also communicated to the Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature, a memoir of Mr. Barbauld; in which his character is thus delineated.