Barnes

Barnes, WILLIAM, perhaps the first of English purely pastoral poets, was born in the vale of Blackmore, of an old Dorsetshire stock that had once owned land, February 22, 1800. Spite of early difficulties, he acquired remarkable learning, and after some time in a solicitor's office, taught a school at Dorchester with success. After obtaining a university degree and receiving ordination, he took the curacy of Whitcombe in 1847, from which he passed to the rectory of Winterbourne Came in 1862. Meanwhile he had been making himself widely known by his fine idyllic poetry in the Dorsetshire dialect, 'the bold and broad Doric of England.' His first volume appeared in 1844; the second, the well-known Hwomely Rhymes, in 1859; the third in 1862; the three were collected together in 1879, and published as Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect. These poems reveal straightforward simplicity and sincerity of style, with rare imaginative insight into the simple joys and sorrows of country life. But his sympathetic affection for the human life that 'clothes the soil' is paralleled by his patience in observing the quiet life of nature, and his power of reproducing artistically for others the impression it makes upon the mind. The sweet air of southern England blows through every stanza he writes, and has had a charm of quite singular influence on thousands who have seen Dorsetshire but with the inward eye. His verses are none the less completely artistic that the art is all unconscious, and none the less completely beautiful that the representation of man and nature in them is within its limits completely true. His world was the secluded vale of Blackmore; and its humble folk, with all their quaintness and humour, he has photographed with absolute truth, though with the instinct of the artist he has chosen as subject of poetic treatment only such episodes as are in themselves beautiful. There was nothing of Crabbe in his poetical equipment, and it need not be objected to a particular poet that he had eyes only for the pathos and beauty of country life, none for its squalor and misery. 'His verse is sometimes deficient in lyrical swing, as is apt to be the case when descriptive poetry is written in the dancing measures, which are too entirely emotional for work so calm and contemplative as the nature poetry of the English country.' Barnes made himself well known also by his chivalrous attempt to preserve the purity of the mother-tongue. His Outline of English Speech-craft (1878) is an attempt to teach the English language in purely English words. His tenses are 'time-takings,' adjectives are 'mark-words of suchness,' degrees of comparison are 'pitchmarks;' and sentences like 'these pitchmarks offmark sundry things by their sundry suchnesses' make large demands upon the reader's ingenuity. He wrote several works of value on philological subjects, and kept up an active interest in the progress of English scholarship almost till his death at the ripe age of eighty-six, October 1886. See the Life by his daughter, Mrs Baxter (1887).