POETRY.-Without the Children, 242. A Lancashire Doxology, 242. An Ode to Memory, 242. Relieved, 253. The Cross, 253. Hearth Song, 272. Ready for Duty, 272. A Character, 272.

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SHORT ARTICLES.-Poison as food for Insects, 246. Earl Russell's first Wife, 246. Discovery of an old Map, 246. Forty Years in America," 246. The Skull of Confucius at the Great Exhibition in London, 246. The London Religious Tract Society, 246. A new Life of Michael Angelo," 246. “Anecdotical Memoir of Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, 246. Anecdotes of the Emperor Napoleon, 249. MM. Vitray and Desmartis on Diseases, 249. A curious Question in the Law of Literary Copyright, 271. Collection of old Cookery Books, 288. Sir Humphrey Davy, 288.

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From The Spectator.
JOHN CLARE.

as he could lead the fore-horse of the harvest team, he was set to work, and the Quarterly reviewer tells us, on knowledge derived from his mother, that while thus occupied he had the misfortune to see the loader fall from the wagon and break his neck, which threw him into a fit, from the liability to which he did not recover till after a considerable lapse of time, and which, even in 1820, was liable to return. No doubt this planted the seeds of that madness which the abrupt changes of his future fortunes, the fitful petting, and neglect of high society, and, still more, pecuniary care, developed. He used to tell of the horror which his imagination caused him in the dark winter walks home from Maxey,

THE Quarterly Review, while still fresh from the stupid and cruel intellectual onslaught, which is said to have hastened the death of Keats, published an article in the number for May, 1820, on "The Poems of John Clare, a Northamptonshire peasant," which reads like an attempt to atone for that offence, by the generous and even lavish appreciation which it bestowed on a young poet of real, though infinitely fainter, genius, but also of far lower station, and apparently far more dependent on the kindly appreciation of the world. Neither the unkindness nor the kindness of the Quarterly was destined to have a fortunate issue. The a neighboring village, where he was sent to former wounded a sensitive nature to the quick, which the writer could not have wished, while it probably raised the fame of the poetry, which the critic could not understand, and injured that of the critic,-a result he can be still less supposed to have desired; the latter answered its kindly purpose better at first, for it brought a sudden gust of popularity to the author; but it issued in a result still sadder,—broken ambition and disordered reason, a manhood of deepening gloom, as the visions of youth sank slowly into melancholy distance, and a "dreary gift of years' " that only terminated on the 20th May in the wards of an asylum for the in

sane.

John Clare was born on the 13th July, 1793, at Helpstone, where the border of Northamptonshire touches the fens of Lincolnshire. He was the son of Parker Clare, an agricultural laborer, one of the toiling millions of men sunk in labor and pain,' ," who earned his ten shillings a week, in prosperous times, but who, when rheumatism had made him a cripple, long before young Clare grew up, was receiving five shillings a week from the parish, to eke out the scanty wages of his weakly son. John Clare was the elder and the smaller of twins, but yet the only survivor, the sister, who died immediately after her birth, being, according to the testimony of the mother, Ann Clare, a bouncing girl, while John might have gone into a pint pot." John had very early a thirst for knowledge, and delicate as he was, before his father broke down, used to earn by the labor of eight weeks enough to pay for a month's rude schooling. As soon

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buy flour for the family. His mother's
ghost stories would all recur to his mind, and
to drive them out, he formed the habit of
walking with his eyes fixed immovably on
the ground, versifying to himself some adven-
ture "without a ghost in it," an intellect-
ual effort which so effectually exorcised the
goblins that he often reached home before
he was himself aware of his approach. The
preface to his first volume, written for him
by some more practised hand, tells us that
his first passion for poetry was excited by a
glimpse of Thomson's "Seasons," which a
fellow-laborer showed him in a field. He
was so much delighted that he never rested
till he had earned a shilling to buy himself a
copy, and then set off on his errand to Stam-
ford for that purpose, so early that he
reached the town before any shop was open.
He brooded over Thomson till his own
thoughts took a similar shape; and his fa-
ther and mother, who always feared for his
mind, admitted that "the gear was not men-
ded" in their estimation, when they discov-
ered his habit of writing, and of writing,
moreover, in verse.
"When he was four-

teen or fifteen," says Dame Clare (we quote
the Quarterly reviewer)," he would show me
a piece of paper, printed sometimes on one
side and scrawled all over on the other, and
he would say, 'Mother, this is worth so
much;' and I used to say to him, Ay,
boy, it looks as if it warr!' but I thought
it was wasting his time,”-
-a view which,
according to the preface to one of his vol-
umes, the old woman illustrated practically
by going to the hole where he kept his verses,
when she wanted paper to light the fires.

When his father broke down, it was a hard | The world, however, was not more fastidtoil to him to supply his place, with the fee-ious than the Quarterly reviewer, and was ble frame which nature had given him. All delighted with the promise of a new pet. It his poems betray a profound sensitiveness, was a danger not entirely unforeseen by Clare's not only to the beauty of nature, but to the kind friend in the Quarterly. The article physical pain of the drudgery he had to en- ends with saying, "We counsel, we entreat dure, and which he seems to have endured him, to continue something of his present with a good courage, if not quite without re-occupations; to attach himself to a few, in pining. This was one of his complaints

"Toiling in the naked fields
Where no bush a shelter yields,
Needy Labor dithering stands,
Beats and blows his numbing hands,
And upon the crumping snows
Stamps in vain to warm his toes."

the sincerity of whose friendship he can confide, and to suffer no temptations of the idle and the dissolute to seduce him from the quiet scenes of his youth-scenes so congenial to his taste-to the hollow and heartless society of cities; to the haunts of men who would court and flatter him while his

A delicate poetic organization earning a max-name was new, and who, when they had imum wage of nine shillings a week, on con- contributed to distract his attention and imdition of going honestly through all the ex- pair his health, would cast him off uncereposure and toil of the coarsest labor, must moniously to seek some other novelty." The indeed have had much to suffer, and felt a danger was indeed only too great. Clare passionate desire to escape, as from a life of was sent for to London, and became the darslavery. At length, in 1818, when he was al-ling and lion of a season or two, and for a ready twenty-five years old, and in great pov-time a favored contributor to keepsakes, anerty, he determined to make an effort for a nuals, and literature of that sort. But his hearing. A printer at Market Deeping introduced him to a bookseller in Stamford, who thought well of his poems, gave him a few pounds at once, and promised more if they should succeed. Messrs. Taylor (of the firm of Taylor and Hessey), of Fleet Street, took them from the Stamford publisher, and in 1820 they appeared and were almost immediately made famous by the favor of the Quarterly Review.

There is reality, the sincerest love of nature, the minutest observation of nature, in the first of Clare's volumes, which, under the favorable notice of the Quarterly Review, speedily reached a fourth edition, but there is far less of the real breath of poetry than in what he afterwards wrote in dejection, and even in the intervals of madness. It is difficult to account for the enthusiasm of the Quarterly reviewer on any but the expiatory theory. "Some of his ballad stanzas rival the native simplicity of Tickel or Mallett," says the reviewer, quoting not unpleasing stanzas, which may, perhaps, deserve that not very impressive praise, but which, certainly, could never take hold of any one's imagination, while some of Clare's later efforts do, we think, approach, though only approach, in depth of pathos to the heartbreaking, but most musical, wail of Cowper's lines on the " Castaway."

was not a head to gain by experience of this kind; for his simple, daisy-like poetry was always born of solitude and fresh air, and he tells us in one of the best of his early couplets, that even in the country he loved most to walk and brood at dawn,—

"Ere smoking chimneys sicken the young light, And Feeling's fairy visions fade away.'

د,

And clearly he did not gain as a poet by his short-lived social success. The volume he published in 1827, called the "Shepherd's Calendar," seems to us much inferior to either his earlier or his later verses, and apparently it had little popularity. Indeed, his popularity, never grounded on anything that had much real root in the public estimation, had now greatly declined. No doubt, neglect and this comparative literary failure did much to depress him in health and spirits. He speaks of imperfect health in his preface, and mentions it again with a more melancholy air in the few lines of preface to the last volume he published in 1835,-and not without reason. In 1837, his mind gave way, and he was placed under the care of a physician at Epping Forest, with whom he continued, with intervals of improvement, for many years. In 1841, an appeal was issued, on his behalf, stating that anxiety for his wife and family chiefly retarded his re

"I AM.

245

covery; that £393 had been raised for him, | in a volume taken from the library of the and invested in 1820, which produced, how- asylum, has placed at our disposal verses of ever, less than £14 a year; that the Mar- no ordinary pathos, though broken by inquis of Exeter and Earl Spencer allowed him coherencies corresponding probably to the £25 a year more between them, and that if chasms in the poor poet's own thought :£20 a year more could be raised, his mind might be sufficiently at ease to give his health a fair chance. How the appeal was responded to we do not know ;-he never joined his family, and resided for many years before his death, with wandering mind, but quite harmless, and able often both to read and write, in the Northampton County Lunatic Asylum, where he died last week.

"I am, yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes;
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in Love's and Death's oblivion
tossed,

And yet I am, and live with shadows lost.

Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life nor joys.

But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems, And e'en the dearest whom I loved the best Are strange, nay, far more strangers than the

rest.

The best lines Clare ever wrote were writ-"Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, ten during the dejection which preceded and followed the partial alienation of his reason. In his earlier poems there is simplicity, deep love of nature, but a want of pervading unity of either thought or feeling. There is a tendency to vagrancy of mind, to almost childlike cataloguing of natural objects and impressions, which makes his poetry scrappy,often, too, a fault of Cowper's, whose verses his sometimes resemble. Indeed, he says of himself with touching simplicity in the volume of 1835:—

"I dwell on trifles like a child,

I feel as ill becomes a man, And yet my thoughts, like weedlings wild, Grow up and blossom where they can." But when he was sinking into dejection, the key-note of melancholy which runs through his lines alone suffices to give them a certain unity of feeling, and to impress a definite aspect on the natural scenes he still loves to depict, more touching and specific than if you could see a sun setting in soft glooms behind them. Thus he sings of "poet" (evidently himself) in his last issued volume :-

"He feeds on Spring's precarious boon,
A being of her race,

Where light and shade and shower and sun
Are ever changing place.

"To-day he buds and glows to meet

To-morrow's promised shower,
Then, crushed by Care's intruding feet,
He fades, a broken flower."

And probably the verses he wrote at intervals after his loss of reason are more expressive of the poet's own nature than anything he had yet published. One who visited him a few months since, and who found him deep

"I long for scenes where man has never trod,

A place where woman never smiled or wept, There to abide with my Creator God,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, Untroubling and untroubled where I lie, The grass below,—above, the vaulted sky.”

It is a sad picture this of the rescue of a
poet's nature from mere mechanic toil and
drudgery only at the cost of his understand-
ing and judgment,-though it may be that
the fanning of that vital spark of his nature
which made him a poet could not but have
involved, in this life, the withdrawal for a
time of that never large stock of vitality
which he threw into the more common duties
When the vital powers
and relations of life.
are small the concentration of them at the
true focus of the nature not unfrequently
involves their failure in the outlying facul-
ties. This was what Wordsworth feared
when he drew with so much power the panic
of his own soul in contemplating the possible
future:

"We poets in our youth begin in gladness,

But thereof come in the end despondency and madness."

That was the fate of Clare. During his long insanity, from the age of forty-four to his death at seventy, he probably realized far more keenly the strength and weakness of a merely receptive nature than at any period of his life. The lines we have just quoted express the shrinking anguish of a spirit which is acted upon by the life around him,