The gentle curve, and sweep the hollow space. 
     With ease to enter and discharge the freight,
     A bowl less concave, but still more dilate,
     Becomes the pudding best.  The shape, the size,
     A secret rests, unknown to vulgar eyes. 
     Experienced feeders can alone impart
     A rule so much above the lore of art. 
     These tuneful lips that thousand spoons have tried,
     With just precision could the point decide,
     Though not in song—­the muse but poorly shines
     In cones, and cubes, and geometric lines;
     Yet the true form, as near as she can tell,
     Is that small section of a goose-egg shell,
     Which in two equal portions shall divide
     The distance from the centre to the side. 
       Fear not to slaver; ’tis no deadly sin;—­
     Like the free Frenchman, from your joyous chin
     Suspend the ready napkin; or like me,
     Poise with one hand your bowl upon your knee;
     Just in the zenith your wise head project,
     Your full spoon rising in a line direct,
     Bold as a bucket, heed no drops that fall. 
     The wide-mouthed bowl will surely catch them all!

WILLIAM BARNES

(1800-1886)

Had he chosen to write solely in familiar English, rather than in the dialect of his native Dorsetshire, every modern anthology would be graced by the verses of William Barnes, and to multitudes who now know him not, his name would have become associated with many a country sight and sound.  Other poets have taken homely subjects for their themes,—­the hayfield, the chimney-nook, milking-time, the blossoming of “high-boughed hedges”; but it is not every one who has sung out of the fullness of his heart and with a naive delight in that of which he sung:  and so by reason of their faithfulness to every-day life and to nature, and by their spontaneity and tenderness, his lyrics, fables, and eclogues appeal to cultivated readers as well as to the rustics whose quaint speech he made his own.

Short and simple are the annals of his life; for, a brief period excepted, it was passed in his native county—­though Dorset, for all his purposes, was as wide as the world itself.  His birthplace was Bagbere in the vale of Blackmore, far up the valley of the Stour, where his ancestors had been freeholders.  The death of his parents while he was a boy threw him on his own resources; and while he was at school at Sturminster and Dorchester he supported himself by clerical work in attorneys’ offices.  After he left school his education was mainly self-gained; but it was so thorough that in 1827 he became master of a school at Mere, Wilts, and in 1835 opened a boarding-school in Dorchester, which he conducted for a number of years.  A little later he spent a few terms at Cambridge, and in 1847 received ordination.  From that time until his death in 1886, most of his days were spent in the little parishes of Whitcombe and Winterbourne Came, near Dorchester, where his duties as rector left him plenty of time to spend on his favorite studies.  To the last, Barnes wore the picturesque dress of the eighteenth century, and to the tourist he became almost as much a curiosity as the relics of Roman occupation described in a guide-book he compiled.