Читать книгу Sweet Hampstead and Its Associations онлайн

79 страница из 97

She, in her early home, had enjoyed those advantages that have so often helped to strengthen and enlarge learned and literary tastes in women, an almost masculine education, and the society of highly-cultured and liberal-minded men. She was the only daughter of Dr. Aikin, who himself, we are told, was a man of sound scholarship, and the friend of Drs. Priestley, Enfield, and Doddridge, the latter of whom for some time resided in the family.[61]

Back View of Houses, Church Row.

Her first poems were published the year before her marriage, and were followed by her ‘Hymns in Prose,’ for children, hymns that were themselves full of poetry—at least, to the perception of one child’s heart—and were accepted by hundreds of parents with gratitude and admiration. Other works followed, and she assisted her brother, Dr. John Aikin, in the delightful series of stories entitled ‘Evenings at Home.’ But the fruits of her training and associations are best seen in her critical and graver writings, which display ‘a strong, logical, and correctly-thinking mind’[62]—nay, in some of them a breadth and liberality of thought quite beyond the times in which she lived; and it required in that day some courage to publish them. Take, for instance, her ‘Observations on the Devotional Taste,’ on ‘Sects and Establishments,’ a page of which I append.[63]