Devonshire Characters and Strange EventsBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
Devonshire Characters and Strange Events
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Devon (England) -- Biography; Devon (England) -- History
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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