His career during the last twenty-five years of his life, beginning with 1817, belongs to history rather than to literature.

In 1853, wealthy, loaded with imperial favors, richly pensioned, he went abroad, and settled in Baden-Baden, where he married (being at the time sixty years of age, while his bride was nineteen), and never returned to Russia.

During the last eleven years of his semi-invalid life, with disordered nerves, he approached very close to mysticism.[9] Batiushkoff, as a poet, was the exact opposite of Zhukovsky, being the first to grasp the real significance of the mood of the ancient classical poets, and to appropriate not only their views on life and enjoyment, but even their plastic and thoroughly artistic mode of expression.

While Zhukovsky removed poetry from earth and rendered it ethereal, Batiushkoff fixed it to earth and gave it a body, demonstrating all the entrancing charm of tangible reality.

Yet, in language, point of view, and literary affiliations, he belongs, like Zhukovsky, to the school of Karamzin.