Poems

At this point, the youth in whose story the interest lies being sixteen years old, Cupid, with no loss of his bright qualities after so many centuries of exercise, comes into the recital. To JOHN CLARE, who was moving rapidly towards the full worship of all things lovely, Mary Joyce appeared to be nobody less bewildering and enchanting than a stray from heaven; and though he was prevented from wearing her, the dice of Fortune falling adverse from the box, he never ceased to regard her as his ideal. Of the many pathetic incidents of his life not the least touching is the fact that in his years of a broken brain he cherished as a chief delusion the belief that Mary Joyce was indeed his wife. What the feelings of a nature so intense were when the father of his sweetheart intervened as the proverbial slip between the cup and the lip, we can only conjecture, though the tracing of results is easy enough. After leaving the tankards and the horses of the "Blue Bell," JOHN CLARE cast about him for some other form of employment. Escaping the pains of stone-cutting and cobbling, he succeeded in becoming a gardener's apprentice at Burghley Park, the seat of the Marquis of Exeter.