The _Original Poems_[135] have a spontaneity and freshness that take a small child at once. The sisters never lost the secret of writing for children, because they could always think with them. Ann, the eldest, had mothered the family, and afterwards brought up a family of her own; yet she wrote at _eighty_: “The feeling of being a grown woman, to say nothing of an _old_ woman, does not come naturally to me”.