Who is not familiar with this sort of stuff? It is to be found in "Keepsakes," in those old pocket-books in leather, with a dozen badly engraved steel-plate landscape scenes at the beginning, and a budget of verses and rhapsodies that follow, before we come to the calendar and the sheets for notes.
Of himself, Capern wrote:—
He owns neither houses nor lands,
His wealth is a character good;
A pair of industrious hands,
A drop of poetical blood.
It was a drop, and a small drop. He had an ear for rhythm; he had a warm appreciation of Nature; he had sentiment—but not ideas, the germs of mental life to be carried on from generation to generation. The leaves of poetic expression, graceful diction, fade and wither. It is ideas alone that are the fruit of the tree of mental life that will survive. Of such we find none in Capern's volumes.
His verses are very creditable to the man, considering his position, but he is not to be named in the same breath with Robert Burns and Edwin Waugh. Capern had the poetic faculty, but he trod wrong paths, with the result that nobody henceforth will read his verses, which are not likely to be republished. Edward Capern was born at Tiverton on 21 January, 1819, where his father carried on business as a baker. When Edward was about two years old, the family removed to Barnstaple, and his mother becoming bed-ridden, young Edward, then about eight years old, found employment at a local lace factory, toiling often, for a scanty wage, twenty out of the twenty-four hours. The long hours and the trying nature of the work permanently injured his eyesight, and seriously affected his after life.
