Worked continuously at verse and prose, contributing largely to the magazines. A new series of Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect appeared in 1862, and he was persuaded in 1868 to publish a series of Poems of Rural Life in Common English, which was less successful than his dialect poems. These latter were collected into a single volume in 1879, and on the 7th of October 1886 Barnes died at Winterborne Came. His poetry is essentially English in character; no other writer has given quite so simple and sincere a picture of the homely life and labour of rural England. His work is full of humour and the clean, manly joy of life; and its rusticity is singularly allied to a literary sense and to high technical finish. He is indeed the Victorian Theocritus; and, as English country life is slowly swept away before the advance of the railway and the telegraph, he will be more and more read for his warm-hearted and fragrant record of rustic love and piety. His original and suggestive books on the English language, which are valuable in spite of their eccentricities, include: - Se Gefylsta: an Anglo-Saxon Delectus (1849); A Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect (1864); An Outline of English Speech-Craft (1878); and A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect (Dorchester, 1886).
See The Life of William Barnes, Poet and Philologist (1887), by his daughter, Lucy E. Baxter, who is known as a writer on art by the pseudonym of Leader Scott; and a notice by Thomas Hardy in the Athenaeum (16th of October 1886).