Lucy Aikin's Unitarian principles, which she inherited from her father, remained with her all of her life and are forcibly and eloquently expressed in her long correspondence with Dr. William Ellery Channing, a Unitarian minister who lived in Boston. On account of failing health, John Aikin moved again in 1797, this time to Stoke Newington, where Lucy Aikin remained until his death.
Aikin began writing early, contributing articles and reviews to magazines when she was seventeen. When she was twenty, her anthology Poetry for Children appeared. It included original work--poems by Aikin and by her aunt, Barbauld--but principally presented selections from English Augustan writers, including Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Joseph Addison, and John Gay. William Shakespeare is also represented, as is John Milton; in later editions poems by William Wordsworth appear.
Aikin favors both the moral and the pathetic in her own poetry and in the poems she selects from others. One of the two Shakespearean selections is the following quatrain: "What stronger breast-plate than a heart untainted? / Thrice is he arm'd that hath his quarrel just; / And he but naked, though lock'd up in steel, / Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted." Even a casual reader of Shakespeare will recognize that this is not the Bard at his most stirring, melodic, or memorable--even the sentiments expressed are said more movingly elsewhere.
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