confess, would be natural to me now, my search for a book took me
straight to that part of the library in which the poets congregated. My
eye wandered over the shelves, and lighted upon _Poems in the
Dorsetshire Dialect_ by the Rev. William Barnes. Hadspen House was
quite close to the Dorset border. I was interested and I took down the
volume. I don't think I had ever heard of Barnes before, but being very
fond of the Somersetshire dialect and proud of my ability to speak in
it, my first impulse was rather to turn up my nose at the vernacular of
a neighbouring county. It was, then, with a decided inclination to look
a gift-horse in the mouth that I retired with Barnes to my den. Yet, as
Hafiz says, "by this a world was affected." I opened the poems at the
enchanting stanzas, "Lonesome woodlands! zunny woodlands!" and was
transported. In a moment I realised that for me a new foot was on the
earth, a new name come down from Heaven. I read and read, and can still
remember how the exquisite rhythm of "Woak Hill" was swept into my mind,
to make there an impression which will never be obliterated while life
lives in my brain. I did not know, in that delirium of exaltation which
a poetic discovery always makes in the heart of a youth, whether most to
admire the bold artifice of the man who had adapted an unrhymed Persian
metre--the Pearl--to the needs of a poem in the broadest Dorsetshire
dialect, or the deep intensity of the emotion with which he had clothed
a glorious piece of prosodiac scholarship.

I recognised at once that the poem was fraught with a pathos as
magnificent as anything in the whole range of classic literature--and
also that this pathos had that touch of stableness in sorrow which we
associate, and rightly associate, with the classics. Miserably bad
scholar as I was, and am, I knew enough to see that the Dorsetshire
schoolmaster and village parson had dared to challenge the deified
Virgil himself. The depth of feeling in the lines--