Is gone to vind a better pleäce.”
Many poems are given to another and not very different kind of memories, those of childhood, and the essence of them, with a hundred pretty variations, is,—
“How smoothly then did run my happy days,
When things to charm my mind and sight were nigh.”
Most are memories of the open air, of “lonesome woodlands, sunny woodlands,” the river and the harvest fields, to the accompaniment of the songs of birds and milkmaids. The children are always laughing, playing, dancing in their “tiny shoes,” but their heavy elders and the home under the elm or in the “lonesome” grove of oak remind us, if not them, of age and death.
The love-poems further illustrate Barnes’s Dorset homeliness and humbleness. Young maidens delight him much as children do; yet even while he is praising the Blackmoor maidens he says,—
“Why, if a man would wive
An’ thrive, ’ithout a dow’r,
Then let en look en out a wife