He was very urgent in the promotion of the cause of peace and arbitration between nations, and wrote a series of tracts entitled Peace Pages, of which some hundreds of thousands were distributed, and produced as much effect on the policy of nations as waste paper. In the year 1864 a prize was offered for the best poem on the tercentenary of the birth of Shakespeare. It was competed for by over a hundred persons in Great Britain and America. Mr. Harris gained the prize, and was presented with a gold watch. It is not possible to estimate its value, poetically, without a knowledge of the "poems" that failed, and the discrimination of the judges.[41] From first to last John Harris published no less than sixteen volumes of verse. He died in 1884, and was buried in Treslothian Churchyard, near Camborne. He had received a grant of £50 per annum from the Royal Literary Fund, 1872-75, and £200 from the Royal Bounty Fund in 1877.
He had a son, John Alfred Harris, born at Falmouth in 1860, who became a wood engraver, working in a recumbent position owing to a spinal affliction. He illustrated some of his father's works. Another son, James Howard Harris, born in 1857, became master of the Board School, Porthleven, and wrote a memoir of his father.
John Harris had the faculty of receiving impressions from the objects of nature, as does a mirror, but had no power to give forth flashes of genius, for of genius he had none. His verses read smoothly and pleasantly, but will not live, as there is no vital spark in them. He stands, however, on a higher level than Edward Capern, the Devonshire postman "poet," but immeasurably below Burns and Waugh.
He published, moreover, a series of addresses, but all marked with the same paucity of idea, lack of original thought. A good but very self-satisfied man, he reaped far higher applause in his day as he deserved, and in another generation will be clean forgotten. He called himself the miner poet, but he is not even a minor poet. There is something pathetic in the contemplation of a man of this sort. I have come across several instances—men who have a love of nature, an appreciation of the beautiful and the good and the true, but have no genius, no originality, who can imitate but create nothing. It is the same with musicians. There are a thousand who can write songs, but only one in a thousand who can produce a pure melody. The mirror reflects objects, but the burning-glass focusses the sun's rays in a pencil of fire that kindles whatever it falls on. Such is the difference between the versifier and the poet.
Nulla placere diu, nec vivere carmina possunt
Quæ scribuntur aquæ portoribus.
Hor. Ep. I. 19.
EDWARD CHAPMAN
Hals tells the following story of Mr. Edward Chapman, of Constantine. But before giving it, it will be well to say a few words of the Chapman family. The name suffices to show that it was not Cornish by origin, and indeed in the Heralds' Visitation it is recorded to have come from the North. Why they came down one cannot say, but they married well. One John Chapman, of Harpford, in Devon, had to wife a daughter of Chichester, of Hall, and his son Edward married a Prideaux, and settled at Resprin in S. Winnow, and as that was a manor that belonged to the Prideaux family it is probable that his wife was an heiress. Edward, the grandson, baptized at S. Winnow May 12th, 1647, was probably the person mentioned by Hals, to whom the adventure is attributed. He was married to a daughter of Bligh, of Botathen.
"This gentleman received from God's holy angels a wonderful preservation in the beginning of the reign of William III when returning from Redruth towards his own house about seven miles distant, with his servant, late at night, and both much intoxicated with liquor (as himself told me); nevertheless having so much sense left as to consider that they were to pass through several tin mines or shafts near the highway, on the south-east side of Redruth town, alighted both from their horses, and led them in their hands after them. The servant went somewhat before his master, the better to keep the right road in those places, which occasioned Mr. Chapman's turning aside somewhat out of the way, whereby in the dark he suddenly fell into a tin mine above twenty fathoms deep, at whose fall into this precipice his horse started back and escaped; in this pit or hole Mr. Chapman fell directly down fifteen fathoms without let or intermission, where meeting with a cross drift (above six fathoms of water under it), he in his campaign coat, sword, and boots, was miraculously stopped, when, coming to himself, he was not much sensible of any hurt or bruises he had received, through the terror and horror of his fall; when, considering in what condition he was, he resolved to make the best expedient he could to prevent his falling further down (where, by the dropping of stones and earth moved by his fall, he understood there was much water under), so he rested his back against one side of the ruin, and his feet against the other, athwart the hole, and in order to fix his hands on some solid thing, drew his sword out of its sheath, and thrust the blade thereof as far as he could into the opposite part of the shaft, and so in great pain and terror rested himself.