Museum, the London Library is the largest in the Metropolis, and it has not been deemed worth while to include in it one of Capern's volumes of verses.
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 BurdettCoutts, 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.
