An' took her wi' air-reachen arm
To my zide at Woak Hill

is not exceeded even by those which tell how Æneas filled his arms with
the empty air when he stretched them to enfold the dead Creusa.

Upon the last two stanzas in "Woak Hill" I may as truly be said to have
lived for a month as Charles Lamb lived upon "Rose Aylmer."

An' that's why folk thought, for a season,
My mind were a-wandren
Wi' sorrow, when I wer so sorely
A-tried at Woak Hill.

But no; that my Mary mid never
Behold herzelf slighted,
I wanted to think that I guided
My guide from Woak Hill.

Equally potent was the spell cast by what is hardly less great a poem
than "Woak Hill," the enchanting "Evenen, an' Maids out at Door." There
the Theocritus of the West dares to use not merely the words of common
speech and primitive origin, but words drawn from Low Latin and of
administrative connotation. Barnes achieves this triumph in words with
perfect ease. He can use a word like "parish" not, as Crabbe did, for
purposes of pure narration but in a passage of heightened rhetoric:

But when you be a-lost vrom the parish, zome more Will come on in your
pleazen to bloom an' to die; An' the zummer will always have maidens