XX. IN MEMORIAM. 



confident of the supporting testimony of many others whom he 

 taught. If this be so what scholastic success could be greater ? 

 As regards his literary labours, perhaps few know anything of them 

 except of the Dorset poems ; but may that not be simply a proof of 

 their ignorance, not of any want of intrinsic value in his other 

 works *? And as respects his clerical life, those who know what it 

 was speak of it as being as thoroughly complete as everything else 

 he did ; its sphere was no doubt small, but had it been ten, 

 or twenty times the extent it was it could not have been more 

 sincerely or systematically worked. Where is any proof of non- 

 success in these separate parts then of Mr. BARNES' life? But 

 these parts are simply parts of a whole, harmonious life, and ought 

 not to be taken and analysed separately, rudely dissected like a 

 beautiful flower by a would-be botanist ! and that these portions 

 of Mr. BARNES' life and works are what they are constitutes, it 

 seems to me, his life's true success. 



Space will not allow me to say anything scarcely of Mr. BARNES' 

 published works, excepting the one mentioned before, " Labour and 

 Gold," and his Dorset dialect poems. Criticism of these poems, in 

 the ordinary sense, would be out of place impossible ! unnatural ! ! 

 One might with equal propriety criticise a handful of spring flowers 

 plucked fresh from the hedge-row. We might indeed admire one 

 flower rather than another ; we might find greater beauties, greater 

 sweetness, deeper suggestions in one than in another; but criticism, 

 as such, would be, like the dissector's knife barbarous, almost 

 brutal ! Mr. BARNES' poems are the spontaneous outflowings of his 

 remembrance of persons, things, and scenes, of which he bore away 

 as he viewed them, the bright, the pure, the good side only. He 

 looked at Nature, and human nature in his Blackmoor Vale 

 haunts, with a soul only open to its beauties quite closed (as far 

 as it was possible) to all that might have been disfiguring or 

 unsweet. His mind was attuned to harmonies, not discords ; such 

 discords as may occasionally sound out in the songs he sings are 

 instantly resolved into sweet harmony again. I am told, on 

 good authority, that he never, with perhaps one exception, wrote 



