JOHN CLARE BY HIMSELF

for as I passd those awful places, tho I dare not look boldly up, my eye was warily on the watch, glegging under my hat at every stir of a leaf or murmur of the wind and a quaking thistle was able to make me swoon with terror

I generaly kept looking on the ground and I have been so taken with my story that I have gone muttering it over into the town before I knew I got there this has often embarrasd me by being overheard by some one who has asked me who I was talking too? I think I was 13 years of age now but trifling things are never pun[c]tually rememberd as their occurence is never strikingly impressd on the memory, so I cannot say with assurance none of these things was committed to paper this summer I met with a fragment of Thompsons Seasons17 a young man, by ttade a weaver, much older then myself, then in the village, show'd it me I knew nothing of blank verse nor ryhme either otherwise than by the trash of Ballad Singers, but I still remember my sensations in reading the opening of Spring I cant say the reason, but the following lines made my heart twitter with joy.

Come gentle Spring, ethereal mildness come And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud, While music wakes around, veild in a shower Of shadowing roses, on our plains desend.1 8

I greedily read over all I coud before I returnd it and resolvd to posses one my self, the price of it being only l5/6d I expressd my supprise at seeing such a fine poem so carlessly handld, most part of Winter being gone, but the owner only laughd at me and said 'twas reckoned nothing of by himself or friends' he and his friends were methodists and he presented Wesleys hymns as a rival of exellence I said nothing but thought (whatever his religion might be) the taste of him and his friends was worth little notice I have since seen plenty of these fanatics to strengthen my first opinion, as some of them will not read a book that has not the words Lord and God19 in it this I assert as a fact to my knowledge and I have always lookd on their concieted affectations

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