‘Till all my sense is lost in infinite’
This chapter traces Anna Letitia Barbauld’s long-standing project to reassert an emotional aspect to Rational Dissenting prayer, which threatened to slip into sterilely intellectual contemplation. However, evoking various affective legacies relevant to Dissenting sensibility—from Isaac Watts to Edward Young—creates poems that struggle to reconcile the competing pulls of reason and passion. Whilst a scene she inherits from the thought of the Unitarian theologian Joseph Priestley—the solitary intellect meditating silently on the sublimity of the divine—overhangs her work, she moves increasingly beyond it. She experiments with greater degrees of affect in both verse and prose hymns, and the chapter concludes by examining a final Barbauldian understanding of the emotions of prayer as intrinsically social and intersubjective.