Jean Ingelow

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Miss Ingelow is very fond of children, and herein is, perhaps, one secret of her success. In Off the Skelligs she says: "Some people appear to feel that they are much wiser, much nearer to the truth and to realities, than they were when they were children. They think of childhood as immeasurably beneath and behind them. I have never been able to join in such a notion. It often seems to me that we lose quite as much as we gain by our lengthened sojourn here. I should not at all wonder if the thoughts of our childhood, when we look back on it after the rending of this vail of our humanity, should prove less unlike what we were intended to derive from the teaching of life, nature, and revelation, than the thoughts of our more sophisticated days."

Best of all, this true woman and true poet as well, like Emerson, sees and believes in the progress of the race.

"Still humanity grows dearer,
Being learned the more,"

she says, in that tender poem, A Mother showing the Portrait of her Child. Blessed optimism! that amid all the shortcomings of human nature sees the best, lifts souls upward, and helps to make the world sunny by its singing.

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Jean Ingelow died at her home in Kensington, London, July 19, 1897, at the age of sixty-seven, having been born in Boston, Lincolnshire, in 1830. Her long illness ended in simple exhaustion, and she welcomed death gladly.