The Life of John Clare | Page 9

the sailing of the fitful clouds over the horizon,
and the golden blaze of the sky at morn and eventide, were to him
spectacles of which his eye never tired, with which his heart never got
satiated. And as he grew more and more the constant worshipper of
nature, in any of her aspects, so his mind gradually became indifferent
to almost all other objects. What men did, what they had done, or what
they were going to do, he did not seem to care for, or had the least
curiosity to know. In the midst of these solitary rambles from his 'Blue
Bell' home, the news was brought of some extraordinary discoveries at
Castor, his mother's native village. It was news which, one might have
thought, would fire the imagination of any man gifted with the most
ordinary understanding. In a part of the township of Castor called
Dormanton Fields, the greater part of the vast ruins of Durobrivae were
discovered: temples and arches crumbled into dust; many-coloured tiles
and brickwork; urns and antique earthen vessels; and coins, with, the
images of many emperors--so numerous that it looked as if they had
been sown there. To reconstruct the ancient Roman city, to people it
anew with the conquerors of the world, was a task at once undertaken
by zealous antiquarians; yet Clare, though he heard the matter
mentioned by numerous visitors to the 'Blue Bell,' and had plenty of
time for investigation, took so little interest in it as not even to attempt
a walk to the city of ruins, on the borders of which he was feeding his
cattle. Now, as up to a late period of his life, a bunch of sweet violets
was worth to John Clare more than all the ruins of antiquity.
While at the 'Blue Bell' John gradually dropped his algebra and
mathematics, and began to read ghost-stories. The reason of his leaving
the 'sciences called pure' was the discovery that the further he
proceeded on the road the more he saw his utter incapacity to
understand and to master the subjects. His friend and guide, John
Turnill,--subsequently promoted to a post in the excise--was equally
unable to throw light into the darkness of plus and _minus_, and after a
few last convulsive struggles to get through the 'known quantities' into
the unknown regions of _x_, _y_, and _z_, he gave it up as a hopeless

effort. The spare hours henceforth were devoted to studies of a very
different kind, namely, fairy tales and ghost stories. Under the roof of
the 'Blue Bell' no other literature was within his reach, and he was quite
content to draw temporary nourishment from it. Scarcely any books but
these highly spiced ones, stuffed in the pack of travelling pedlars, ever
found their way to Helpston. There was 'Little Red Riding-hood,'
'Valentine and Orson,' 'Sinbad the Sailor,' 'The Seven Sleepers,' 'Mother
Shipton,' 'Johnny Armstrong,' 'Old Nixon's Prophecy,' and a whole host
of similar 'sensation' stories, printed on coarse paper, with a flaming
picture on the title-page. John Clare scarcely knew that there were any
other books than these and the few he had seen at Glinton school in
existence; he had never heard of Shakespeare and Milton, Thompson
and Cowper, Spenser and Dryden; and, therefore, with the natural
eagerness of the young mind just awoke to its day dreams, eagerly
plunged into the new realm of fancy. The effect soon made itself felt
upon the ardent reader, fresh from his undigested algebraic studies. He
saw ghosts and hobgoblins wherever he went, and after a time began to
look upon himself as a sort of enchanted prince in a world of magic. He
had no doubt whatever about the literal truth of the stories he read; the
thought of their being mere pictures of the imagination not entering his
mind for a moment. It was natural, therefore, that he should come to the
conclusion that, as the earth had been, so it was still peopled with
fairies, dwarfs, and giants, with whom it would be his fate to come into
contact some time or other. So he buckled his armour tight, ready to do
battle with the visible and invisible world.
Opportunity came before long. Among his regular duties at the 'Blue
Bell' was that of fetching once a week flour from Maxey, a village
some three miles north of Helpston, near the Welland river. The road to
Maxey was a very lonely one, part of it a narrow footpath along the
mere, and the superstition of the neighbourhood connected strange tales
of horror and weird fancy with the locality. In the long days of summer,
John Clare, who had to start on his errand to the mill late in the
afternoon, managed to get home before dark, thus