ABSTRACT
Edmund Gosse ‘Hardy and I went on Monday last to Came Rectory, where [William Barnes] lies bedridden. It is curious that he is dying as picturesquely as he lived. We found him in bed in his study, his face turned to the window, where the light came streaming in through flowering plants, his brown books on all sides of him save one, the wall behind him being hung with old green tapestry. He had a scarlet bedgown on, a kind of soft biretta of dark red wool on his head, from which his long white hair escaped onto the pillow; his grey beard grown very long upon his breast; his complexion, which you recollect as richly bronzed, has become blanched by keeping indoors, and is now waxily white where it is not waxily pink; the blue eyes half shut, restless under languid lids; the whole body very restless, rising and falling in bed, by means of a very gorgeous bed-rope, with an action like rowing in a boat. I wish I could paint for you the strange effect of this old, old man, lying in cardinal scarlet in his white bed, the only bright spot in the gloom of all these books’ (pp. 669-70).
