WILLIAM BARNES.

TEN days ago, one of the most interesting figures in English literature passed away almost without notice. The Rev. William Barnes (known, where he was known at all, as the " Dorsetshire Poet "), though he died at the age of ninety, cannot be said to have outlived his fame, for fame, in the sense of popularity or worldly applause, he never attained. A little notoriety as the quaint preserver of an English dialect, he no doubt did at one time achieve; a little curiosity among those who hunt for literary oddities was excited by the poet of the West-Country vicarage who poured out from a full heart the love-songs of a peasantry just losing their own character and sinking to the dull level of the English "lower class." Beyond this his general reputation did not reach. But though fame, in the sense of a recognition wide and popular, was never gained by Mr. Barnes, he nevertheleas obtained for his songs what was to him perhaps more valued and more coveted,— first, the appreciation of the simple folk among whom he lived, and then the sincere praise of that small circle of readers of verse who, though they cannot. give popularity, yet know the true gold of poetry, and whose applause, once secured, will ensure that the poet's works shall never utterly die. William Barnes's verse will always find an echo in the heart that is really open to the poet's voice. He is not a poet because he writes in dialect; not merely noteworthy because he seized on what was beautiful in peasant life and expressed it in song. He, like Burns, must have been a poet, in whatever language he had written, and whatever had been his theme. It happened that to the one the tongue of the Scotch Lowlands, to the other that of Dorsetshire and the West, was native ; but both are poets by a tenure, if not as great, at least as free and as secure as that of Shakespeare himself. The Dorsetshire poet, again, like Burns, did not put on his dialect to sing in. It was the language of his daily life. In it he preached to the villagers in the parish church. In it he thought and spoke just as did the men and women with whom he mixed, and with whom he peopled his songs. To certain people, no doubt, the "z's " and " w's " of the poems simply cause a laugh. To them, the refrain," Lwonesome woodlands! zunny woodlands !" or," They evenens in the twilight," are nothing but ridiculous. To others, the poems are merely a closed book. These see that some spirit of song is awake in the verses, but they cannot catch the music. The words are harsh and strange, and they dread the effort—and very naturally, for the effort to like or understand is the death of pleasure—necessary to break through the hard rind and reach the mellow fruit within. With the first class, the people who simply find the "Poems of Rural Life" Laughable, it is useless to argue. We can only exclaim, with the despairing diplomatist obliged to associate with a Minister more than ordinarily thickheaded, pompous, and opinionated,—" Il est impossible de causer avec un monsieur comme ea." It is not, however, mere waste of breath to try and get the others— those who think they cannot understand the dialect, and are terrified by it as they are by broad Scotch—to see his beauties.

The two especial merits of William Barnes's poetry, beyond its extreme dexterity of handling, grace and felicity of expres- sion, and unforced music, are the wonderfully truthful painting of West-Country scenery, and the tenderness, the pathos, and the joy-echoing delight with which he touches the loves and sorrows of simple country folk. To show the quality of his verse by quotation is almost impossible. As observes the writer of an appreciative notice of his work in the St. James's Gazette of October 9th, it is necessary to read widely to fully feel the enchantment of his numbers. The first stanza of the poem called "The Love Child" is exquisite in its quiet simplicity :—

"Where the bridge out at Woodley did stride

Wi' his wide arches' cool, sheided bow, Up above the clear brook that did slide By the poppies befoamed white as snow : As the gilcups did quiver among The deisies a-spread in a sheet, There a quick-trippen maid come along,— Aye, a girl wi' her light-steppen veet."

It is almost an insult to set up a sign-post to the beauties of each a poem. Yet how faithful, how enchanting is the picture called before us ! Any one who knows the West of England, and can picture the streams of Somersetshire or Dorsetshire, can call to mind just such a scene. The wide red sandstone arch, spanning the clear and shallow brook that runs away among the stones and the flower-starred meadows on each hand, all rise before us in the poet's verse. How admirable, how masterly and certain of touch, is the art that makes the girl, not an accessory of the landscape, nor the landscape a mere back- ground to her figure, but blends and interchanges the emotions that each evoke ! Then follows a verse in which "the maid" asks, "Is the road out to Linehan on here by the mead ?" and is told how it goes, and after :-

"' Then you don't seem a-barn an' a-bred,'

I spoke up, at a place here about.'

An' she answer'd wi' oheiiks up as red As a piny hat lelite a-come oat, 'No; I lived wi' my uncle that died Back in Eiipril, an' now I'm a-come

Here to Ham, to my mother, to bide,— Aye, to her house to vind a new hwome.' "

It is nothing short of marvellous that the simple greetings and obvious questionings of country people can be expressed so faithfully, and yet in the language of the purest poetic inspira- tion. The peasants seem to talk as they do in life ; yet some- how the poet's spirit fuses and transmutes their words and deeds from the commonplace of the realist into what is "simple, sen- suous, passionate," and by an alchemy that leaves them still at heart unchanged. To find an analogy for such workmanship, we must seek a sister-art. Frederick Walker's painting has just these qualities. He is always the poet, always fusing the mere metal of earth with the plastic fire of his imagination, bat yet always faithful to human nature. He makes for us no strange, unreal, far-off realm of beauty, but sets beauty itself like a star in our own natural world of men and women. Just as the girl that treads the almshouse path, the man that ships his oars at Marlow Ferry, and the wayside wanderer across whom the faint grey smoke-wreaths curl, are real and human in all their grace and majesty of person, so the men and women of William Barnes's song are as true as they are beautiful and delightful. The poem just quoted ends with a touch of pathos so delicate and so simple, that it would be almost profane to set it out here.

Yet, simple as the poem is, it is at the same time instinct with the spirit of a proudly conscious art. The few words that tell the story of the idyll were once, we are told, actually spoken to the poet. Yet they would have been none the less sincere if only in the singer's heart had they taken shape and substance. As an example of a more Wordsworthian handling of Nature, we may quote a stanza from "The Woodlands :"—

"Oh, spread agar; your leaves an' flow're, Lwonesome woodlands ! nanny woodlands !

Here underneath the dewy show'rs 0' warm-air'd spring-time, sunny woodlands !

As when in drong or open ground, Wi' happy bwoyish heart I round The twitt'ren birds a builden round Your high-boughed hedges, sunny woodlands !"

In another way, the lines on the enclosure of the village common—" The Common a-took in "—are equally charming. How much the country life lost morally—though no doubt it gained materially—by the destruction of the commons and the open-field system of agriculture, can be traced in such verse. The interest that the villagers took in the Manor Courts and in the appointment and the discharge of the duties of the manorial officers was very real, and, could it have been preserved, might have served as a most valuable training for higher political action :—

"Oh, no, Poll! no ! Since they've a-took The common in, our low wold nook Don't seem a bit as used to look When we had runnen room.

Gre't banks do shut up every drong An' stratch wi' thorny backs along Where we did use to run among The vuzzen and the broom.

What fun there wer among us when The hay ward come, wi' all his men, To dreve the common, an' to pen Strange cattle in the pound ; The cows did blare, the men did shout, An' toss their arms and sticks about, An' vo'ks, to own their stock, come out Prom all the hoasen round."

"The Milk-maid o' the Farm" has in it the odour of that wild pastoral rose that twines so gracefully yet so artlessly as it sheds its shining petals, white and crimson, across the poetry of the Elizabethan age. The breath of spring-time" that fans our cheeks in The Winter's Tale, in Jonson's masques, in Fletcher's lyric outbursts, or in Heywood's songs, is with us here as in that older world. In this context, it is not impertinent to notice how William Barnes uses the octosyllabic couplet in a way that often reminds us of Greene, and sometimes even of Shakespeare himself. "The Stwonen Bwoy upon the Pillar," a poem that tells of the little archer of the classic world standing, "his bow let slack," within some crumbling hall's forgotten pleasance, is in this measure, though the qualities just alluded to are not in the particular instance very marked :— "Upon the pillar, all alwone,

Do stan' the little bwoy of stone ; 'S a poppy bud mid linger on, Vorseiiken, when the wheat's a-gone. An' there, then, wi' his bow let slack, An' little quiver at his back, Drongh het an' wet, the little chile Prom day to day do stan' an' smile. When vuat the light, a risen' weak, At break o' day do smite his cheek.

But oh! thik child, that we do vind In childhood still, do call to mind A little bwoy a-calrd by death Long years agoo from our sad he'th."

If our readers have caught the spirit of the Dorsetshire poet in any of the quotations we have given, they will not fail to be 'charmed by the poem, "Evenen, an' Maidens out at door," though in some ways its oddities are more than ordinarily -difficult to get over. We quote one verse :—

" Now the shades o' the elems do stretch mwore an' mwore, Prom the low-zinken zan in the west o' the sky; An' the maIdens do stand oat in clusters avore The doors, vor to chatty an zee vo'k goo by."

The poem is as perfect an elegy as any in English ; or, if the scornful reader will not allow us English, then as any in the world.

Will the Dorsetshire poet's songs ever obtain their true place in English literature by general acclamation ? It is very doubtful. The readers of poetry too often prefer to songs so strong and simple the prettier, softer, more sugared cadences of a Muse that perhaps has bought one-half of her clothes in Paris, and copied the rest from the decadent poetry of Greece and Rome ; who has learned to lisp the conceits that our failing age offers for imagination, or to flaunt the make-believes of passion and inspiration. Those who are thus beguiled will doubtless ever treat the "Poems of Rural Life" with indifference or contempt. Is it worth while to attempt to convert them ? Is it not fitter to leave them, satisfied with the thought that, after all, the loss is theirs? Or, in brave old Ben Jonson's words :—

" If they love lees and leave the lusty wine,

Envy them not their palates with the swine"?