of her imagination. She reiterated to her- it had been so highly pitched, so closely inself and to her mother that she had no termingled with the true worship. She was ground of complaint, that it had been under- long ill, the past series of disappointments stood that the past was to be forgotten, and telling when her strength was reduced: and that Owen was far more worthily employed for many a week she would lie still and dreamy, than in dwelling on them. No blame could but fretted and wearied so as to control herattach to him, and it was wise to choose one self with difficulty when in the slightest deaccustomed to the country and able to carry gree disturbed, or called upon to move or out his plans. The personal feeling might think. When her strength returned under go, but veneration survived. her mother's tender nursing, the sense of duty revived. She thought her youth utterly gone, with the thinning of her hair and the wasting of her cheeks, but her mother must be the object of her care and solicitude, and she would exert herself for her sake, to save her grief, and hide the wound left by the rending away of the jewel of her heart. So she set herself to seem to like whatever her mother proposed, and she acted her interest so well that insensibly it became real. After all, she was but four-and-twenty, and the fever had served as an expression of the feeling that would have its way: she had had a long rest which had relieved the sense of pentup and restrained suffering, and vigor and buoyancy were a part of her character; her tone and manner resumed their cheerfulness, her spirits came back, and though still with the dreary feeling that the hope and aim of life were gone, when she was left to her own musings; she was little changed, and went on with daily life, contented and lively over the details, and returning to her interest in reading, in art, poetry, and in all good works, while her looks resumed their brightness, and her mother congratulated herself once more on the rounded cheek and profuse curls. Mrs. Charlecote never rested till she had learnt all the particulars. It was a dashing, fashionable family, and Miss Charteris had been the gayest of the gay, till she had been impressed by Mr. Sandbrook's ministrations. From pope to lover, Honor knew how easy the transition; but she zealously nursed her admiration for the beauty, exchanging her gayeties for the forest missions, she made her mother write cordially, and send out a pretty gift, and treated as a personal affront all reports of the Charteris disapprobation, and of the self-will of the young people. They were married, and the next news that Honora heard was, that the old general had had a fit from passion; thirdly, came tidings that the eldest son, prosperous M.P., had not only effected a reconciliation, but had obtained a capital living for Mr. Sandbrook, not far from the family-seat. At the year's end Humfrey Charlecote renewed his proposal. It was no small shock to find herself guilty of his having thus long remained single, and she was touched by his kind forbearance, but there was no bringing herself either to love him, or to believe that he loved her, with such love as had been her vision. The image around which she had Mrs. Charlecote declared that her daughter should not stay in town to meet the young couple, and Honora's resistance was not so much dignity, as a feverish spirit of opposition, which succumbed to her sense of duty, but not without such wear and tear of strained cheerfulness and suppressed misery, that when at length her mother had brought her away, the fatigue of the journey completed the work, and she was prostrated for weeks by low fever. The blow had fallen. He had put his hand to the plough and looked back. Faithlessness towards herself had been passed over unrecognized, faithlessness towards his self-consecration was quite otherwise. That which had absorbed her affections and adora- bound her heartstrings came between him tion had proved an unstable, excitable being! Alas! would that long ago she had opened her eyes to the fact that it was her own lofty spirit, not his steadfastness, which had first kept it out of the question that the mission should be set aside for human love. The crash of her idolatry was the greater because and her, and again she begged his pardon and told him she liked him too well as he was to think of him in any other light. Again he, with the most tender patience and humilassed her, and betrayed so little chagrin that ity, asked her to forgive him for having harshe ascribed his offer to generous compassion at her desertion. From The North British Review. 1. Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dia- Edited by George Anderson and John alone go far towards explaining the little notice which Mr. Barnes has hitherto obtained from the public. But the poet, until the appearance of his last volume, which is only just out, and which is comparatively easy to read, has done his very best to aggravate this obstacle to his reputation. For example, because the Dorset dialect is more nearly allied to the ancient Anglo-Saxon than our present ordinary language is, Mr. Barnes has thought proper to assimilate his orthography to the Anglo-Saxon so far as to employ the Anglo-Saxon sign for the th, with the result MR. WILLIAM BARNES is a Dorsetshire that, to the ordinary reader, the first glance clergyman, who appears to consider that his at one of his pages is fatal to any further atforte lies in philology and antiquarianism, tempt. This, and other antiquarian self-inand to be endowed with a naive ignorance of dulgences, Mr. Barnes has most wisely denied the fact that he is one of our very first poets. himself in his new volume; and the conseTo this ignorance we perhaps owe no small quence already is, that his name has, in a few part of the singular charm which delights us months, established itself in the most select in his writings. There is no other living private literary circles, as that of a firstrate writer in whom an equal amount of artistic poet. In this last volume, which is called faculty is combined with so great a freedom" Hwomely Rhymes," the dialect, after half from all species of artifice. At the risk of an hour's acquaintance with it, is nothing but debauching this simplicity of mind in the an additional charm. For, not to speak of poet, we feel bound as critics to do our best the pleasing freshness and mental excitement towards preventing our readers from remain- which accompany the perusal of even oring in a similar ignorance of the value of his dinary ideas and descriptions in a language poetry. Are"Quarterly Reviewers " always or dialect to which we are comparatively unto follow the lead of the popular cry, and the used, there is a real poetic superiority in the voices of the minor periodicals, instead of dialect of the south-western counties of Engboldly assuming the responsibility of being land, for subjects of a simple rural character, themselves leaders of literary opinion? We which fully justifies Mr. Barnes in his adhave more than once shown that such is not miration and adoption of this form of Engour view of our duties. We now speak our lish. mind about Mr. Barnes just as openly as if his poetry had already attained that popular admiration to which our readers, before they shall have finished this article, will agree with us that it is surely destined. The honor and pleasure of being probably the first to introduce the poetry of Mr. Barnes to the notice of the majority of our readers, would certainly not have devolved upon us at this time of day, and after much of that poetry has been already many years before the world, were it not for one or two circumstances, which it seems necessary to point out, in order to account for the hitherto limited audience obtained by the Dorsetshire poet. Mr. Barnes has intensified, in his earlier volume, the above causes of unpopularity by giving that publication a distinctly and avowedly antiquarian air. The publisher, Mr. John Russell Smith, is an antiquarian publisher; and before the reader is allowed a sip of the "pure well of Dorset undefiled," he is expected to wade through fifty pages of dry philological dissertation. We have said enough to explain, though not to justify, the people's hitherto neglect of so remarkable a poet as we shall now show Mr. Barnes to be. gen We cannot, in few words, express the eral character of this gentleman's poetry better than by saying that it combines, in a The fact that the poems are composed in a high degreee, the special merits of Wordsdialect which, however simply and "phoneti- worth and Burns, but in a way which is so cally" spelt, must still offer a slight difficulty, perfectly original as to bear no trace of even at the outset, to their comprehension, would a perusal of those poets by the author. Indeed, we have never before read verses of Mr. Barnes, in his first volume, fulfilled the which it was so hard to trace the artistic ped-essentials of the kind of popularity he here igree. But for that fulness of artistic beauty professes to seek, as completely as he sucwhich seems never to have been attained at a ceeded in nullifying those essentials by the leap and without precedent, we should say outward conditions of which we have comthat all Mr. Barnes' poetry might have been plained. We take the liberty of earnestly written by him had no other poet ever lived. urging upon him the propriety, in future ediThere is, however, no oddity or straining tions of his first collection, of popularizing after originality. Nothing can be more sim- his orthography to an even greater extent ple, straightforward, and unaffected. These than he has done in the " Hwomely Rhymes; " verses are down to the comprehension of the for he has no right to do any thing that unsimplest rustic, and up to the requirements necessarily limits poetry of such universal inof the most fastidious and novelty-seeking terest and application to a local audience. critic. Let us hear the writer's own account of his purpose in writing : "The author thinks his readers will find his poems free of slang and vice, as they are written from the associations of an early youth that was passed among rural families in a secluded part of the country, upon whose sound Christian principles, kindness, and harmless cheerfulness, he can still think with complacency; and he hopes that if his little work should fall into the hands of a reader of that class in whose language it is written, it would not be likely to damp his love of God, or slacken the tone of his moral sentiment, or lower the dignity of his selfesteem; as his intention is not to show up the simplicity of rural life as an object of sport, but to utter the happy emotions with which the mind can, and he thinks should, contemplate the charms of rural nature, and the better feelings and more harmless joys of the families of the small farmhouse and happy cottage. As he has not written for readers who have had their lots cast in town occupations of a highly civilized community, and cannot sympathize with the rustic mind, he can hardly hope that they will understand either his poems or his intention; since, with the not uncommon notion that every change from the plough towards the desk, or from the desk towards the couch of empty-handed idleness, is an onward step towards happiness and intellectual and moral excellence, they will most likely find it very hard to conceive that wisdom and goodness would be found speaking in a dialect that may seem to them a fit vehicle only for the animal wants and passions of a boor. The author, however, is not ashamed to say, that after reading some of the best compositions of many of the most polished languages, he can contemplate its pure and strong Saxon features with perfect satisfaction, and has often found the simple truths enunciated in the pithy sentences of village patriarchs only expanded by the weaker worldliness of modern composition into high-sounding paragraphs." The tender and profound reflective element in Mr. Barnes' poetry, which detects moral beauty in unsuspected places, and expresses it in a way to touch all hearts, is well illustrated by the conclusion of the following little poem, called "Readen ov a head-stone." It will remind our readers at once of Wordsworth's famous "We are seven," to which it is scarcely, if at all, inferior either in beauty or originality. "As I wer readen ov a stwone In Grenley church-yard all alone, To tell how much 'e lov'd her. "The vess wer very good, but shart, Thy soul how much I lov'd thee.' An' keep and lead and love thee.' Though she've a-lost, I thought, so much, When they be dead that lov'd it." NEW POEMS. writer nothing but childish fickleness and poverty of affection! Mr. Barnes is the best writer of rustic eclogues since Theocritus. His pieces in this kind are almost too exquisite in their artistic simplicity and truthfulness to be widely aponce. The following called preciated at "Father come huome," is only an average specimen of many gems of the same kind in Mr. Barnes' volumes : "CHILE. "O mother, mother! be the tiaties done? "Tis jist the very thing var Jack an' I The tiaties must be ready pirty nigh; "Well, mother, here I be oonce muore at huome. "Ah, I be very glad ya be a-come. Ya be a-tired an' cuold enough I s'pose. nose. "JOHN. Why I be nippy: what is ther to eat? "WIFE. "Yer supper's nearly ready. I've a-got Some tiaties here a-doen in the pot; I wish wi' all my heart I had some meat. I got a little kiake too, here, a-beaken o'n Upon the vier. 'Tis done by this time, though. 'E's nice an' moist; var when I wer a-miaken o'n, I stuck some bits of apple in the dough. "JOHN. "I broke my hoss,* an' ben a-fuossed to stan' "Father, tiake off yer shoes, an' gi'e 'em to I; An' have ye got much hedgen muore to do? "JOHN. "Enough to leste var dree weeks muore ar zoo. "WIFE. "An' when y'ave done the job ya be about, D'ye think ya'll have another vound ye out? "JOHN. "O ees, there'll be some muore: when I done that, I got a job o' trenchen to goo at; An' then zome trees to shroud, an' wood to Zoo I do hope to rub on pirty well "An' nex' week, father, I be gwian to goo "An' little Jack, ya know, is gwain to yarn "JOHN. Ya little wench! why, thee bist always baggen. Zoo I shall goo up out o' the woy o' the Fatigued, as we critics are, with a school of poetry which is satisfied with a poem only on condition of its being one galaxy of "striking lines," how can we be sufficiently grateful to Mr. Barnes for having given us many pieces which, like the above, are fine poems without having a single poetical idea" in them? *Hoss, horse; the name given to the plank used by hedgers to stand upon. t To work by the tut is to work by the piece. Clacker, a rattle for keeping birds from corn. Furthermore, how can society thank him any modern poet, but, what is infinitely more enough for the far nobler work of having refreshing to the metropolitan mind, the very made the British laboring classes, for the first life of rustic humanity, expressed with such time, really interesting, from an imaginative surprising truthfulness that the slightest inand poetical point of view? Wordsworth cident becomes interesting. One eclogue is failed in his systematic endeavor to do this; the quarrel of a couple of haymakers as to and, in Burns' poetry of the same kind, there which of them can do most work in the day; is too frequently a protesting tone against the another is the talk of three or four rustics higher orders to allow of its being at all during the process of getting a loaded wagon equal, in this respect, to the poetry of Mr. out of a rut; another discusses the threatened Barnes, who is as wide in his sympathies as inclosure of the common; a fourth contains he is genial. Among the many beauties of the enumeration of the various accidents by the foregoing eclogue, we beg our readers to which the teeth of a hay-rake have disapnotice the truth and power with which the peared: and so on. To have made such subrustic satisfaction in the prospect of plenty of jects interesting without falsifying them, as work is given; the strong yet delicate touch all other rural poets in modern times have by which gratitude to Heaven is expressed in done, is a proof of high poetical power. But the question of the wife:to such subjects Mr. Barnes has by no means restricted himself. We have love eclogues, and even political eclogues. The question of the ballot itself "moves harmonious numbers." Mr. Barnes, we find, is no Radical or Chartist, though eminently a poet of the people. "An' when y'ave done the job ya be about, D'ye think ya'll have another vound ye out?" the similar force and delicacy with which John's combined vexation and good-nature are given, in his answer to the news that the pig had got loose: "Now only think o' that! You must contrive To keep him in, or else he'll never thrive ; " the admirable way in which the weariness and good temper of the laborer and the diligence of the wife to please him are thrown into dramatic relief by the words of the child, always concerned with itself; and, finally, the rhythmical beauty of the last lines, and the appropriateness and quaintness of the proverbial sentence with which the whole poem ends. But this, like all Mr. Barnes' poems, does not depend upon excellences of detail, so much as upon the absolute truth, simplicity, and humanity of the general tenor. We trust that Mr. Barnes is wrong in supposing that his poetry is unfitted to delight “readers who have had their lots cast in town occupations of a highly civilized community,” and in thinking that such persons cannot sympathize with the rural mind." We believe that he is destined to find the majority and the most heartily sympathetic of his readers among such persons. We can assure him that we have found his poetry admired among our acquaintances, in precise proportion to the height and urban character of their cul ture. 66 And this is natural enough. Who like a Londoner for appreciating a whiff of country air? And, in these poems, we have not only the country itself described in touches of truth and tenderness scarcely rivalled by Agen another man, but he must know't. "But if a man ya wou'den like to 'front, dae, An' ax ye var yer vote, what cood ye zae? An' then bezides, when he did count the An' vind white promises wer hafe turn'd Why then he'd think the voters al a pack When Mr. Barnes represents rustic lovers, he does not put fine ladies into cotton gowns, and fine gentlemen into corduroy, and set them to talk modern sentiment in delicate phraseology; but he gives us the people themselves, with their rough and bold speech and manners, and the strong and simple current of their homely passions. |