In 1858, Capern published a second volume, entitled Ballads and Songs, and in 1865 a third, Wayside Warbles. There was yet another, The Devonshire Melodist, in which he set his own songs to tunes of his own composition. But here again he was at fault. Devonshire is full of folk music of the first order. Burns set his songs to folk tunes then sung by the people, but to gross words. He rescued the melodies by giving to them verses that could be sung by decent and clean-minded people. Now had Capern done this for the music of the neighbourhood of Barnstaple he would have been remembered along with these delicious airs, as is Burns along with the Scotch melodies. But not so, he must set his verses to the tootling of his own pipe, entirely without melodious idea in the tunes.
Probably Edward Capern had never heard of Edwin Waugh, who wrote the most delicious, simple, and sweet poems in Lancashire and Yorkshire dialect; every one is a gem. Probably, had he seen these, Capern would have despised them. They breathe the life, the passion, the tenderness, the genius of the North-countrymen. Capern’s verses have none of this merit. They are respectable vers de société, such as any man of culture could have written. His great achievement was, that, not being a man of culture, he could write such respectable “poems.” He took a wrong course from the outset; and unhappily he maintained it. What tells its own tale is this. Next to the British Museum, the London Library is the largest in the Metropolis, and it has not been deemed worth while to include in it one of Capern’s volumes of verses.
His last volume published was Sun-gleams and Shadows (1881), and, unless I am mistaken, all owed their success to subscribers.
In 1866 Capern left Marine Gardens, Bideford, and went to live at Harborne, near Birmingham. His verses found their way into various periodicals, Fun and Hood’s Comic Annual. But his heart was in his native county and thither he returned. He received a pension from the Civil List of £40 a year, which was afterwards increased to £60. It was due to his wife’s ill-health that he left the neighbourhood of Birmingham in 1884, and rented a pleasant cottage at Braunton. There he lost his wife in February, 1894. The two old people had been tenderly attached, and her admiration for and pride in her husband were unbounded. He did not long survive her, for he died on 4 June in the same year as his wife, and they were buried side by side in the churchyard of Heanton Punchardon. The expenses of his funeral were defrayed by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, to whom he had dedicated the second volume of his poems.
It was unfortunate for Capern in a measure that he had been patted on the back by such men as James Anthony Froude, who wrote of him in Fraser’s Magazine: “Capern is a real poet, a man whose writings will be like a gleam of summer sunshine in every household which they enter”; and Walter Savage Landor, who pronounced him to be “a noble poet”; also Alfred Austin, who wrote of him:—
O, Lark-like Poet: carol on,
Lost in dim light, an unseen trill:
We, in the Heaven where you are gone,
Find you no more, but hear you still.