asher; a
mossy urn or two, patches of flowers, but rather fragrant than showy
ones; behind him the loveliest of wooded hills, all toned down by
graceful culture, and before him the silvery mirrors of Windermere and
Rydal-Water.

We have to credit him with some rare and tender description, and
fragments of great poems; but I cannot help thinking that he fancied a
profounder meaning lay in them than the world has yet detected.

John Clare was a contemporary of Wordsworth's, and was most essentially
a poet of the fields. His father was a pauper and a cripple; not even
young Cobbett was so pressed to the glebe by the circumstances of his
birth. But the thrushes taught Clare to sing. He wrote verses upon the
lining of his hat-band. He hoarded halfpence to buy Thomson's "Seasons,"
and walked seven miles before sunrise to make the purchase. The hardest
field-toil could not repress the poetic aspirations of such a boy. By
dint of new hoardings he succeeded in printing verses of his own; but
nobody read them. He wrote other verses, which at length made him known.
The world flattered the peasant-bard of Northamptonshire. A few
distinguished patrons subscribed the means for equipping a farm of his
own. The heroine of his love-tales became its mistress; a shelf or two
of books made him rich; but in an evil hour he entered upon some
farm-speculation which broke down; a new poem was sharply criticized or
neglected; the novelty of his peasant's song was over. Disheartened and
gloomy, he was overwhelmed with despondency, and became the inmate of a
mad-house, where for forty years he has staggered idiotically toward the
rest which did not come. But even as I write I see in the British papers
that he is free at last. Poor Clare is dead.

With this sad story in mind, we may read with a zest which perhaps its
merit alone would not provoke his little sonnet of "The Thrush's
Nest":--

"Within a thick and spreading hawthorn-bush,
That overhung a mole-hill large and round,
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns, of rapture, while I drank the sound
With joy; and oft, an unintruding guest,
I watched her secret toils from day to day,--
How true she warped the moss to form her nest,
And modelled it within with wood and clay,
And by-and-by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,
There lay her shining eggs as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over, shells of green and blue;
And there I witne