“I stand on the bridge where last we stood
     When delicate leaves were young;
   The children called us from yonder wood,
     While a mated blackbird sung.

* * * * *

  “But if all loved, as the few can love,
     This world would seldom be well;
   And who need wish, if he dwells above,
     For a deep, a long death-knell?

  “There are four or five, who, passing this place,
     While they live will name me yet;
   And when I am gone will think on my face,
     And feel a kind of regret.”

With all her literary work, she does not forget to do good personally.  At one time she instituted a “copyright dinner,” at her own expense, which she thus described to a friend:  “I have set up a dinner-table for the sick poor, or rather, for such persons as are just out of the hospitals, and are hungry, and yet not strong enough to work.  We have about twelve to dinner three times a week, and hope to continue the plan.  It is such a comfort to see the good it does.  I find it one of the great pleasures of writing, that it gives me more command of money for such purposes than falls to the lot of most women.”  Again, she writes to an American friend:  “I should be much obliged to you if you would give in my name twenty-five dollars to some charity in Boston.  I should prefer such a one as does not belong to any party in particular, such as a city infirmary or orphan school.  I do not like to draw money from your country, and give none in charity.”

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.

* * * * *

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.