when he happened to come near them, while the old people drew back from
him as in disgust. His sensitive feelings suffered deep under this
treatment of his neighbours, which might have had the worst consequences
but for one great event which suddenly broke in upon him. John Clare fell
in love.

'Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in his glowing hands;
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.
Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of
sight.'

John Clare's first love--the deepest, noblest, and purest love of his
whole life--was for 'Mary,' the Mary of all his future songs, ballads,
and sonnets. Petrarch himself did not worship his Laura with a more
idealized spirit of affection than John Clare did his Mary. To him; she
was nothing less than an angel, with no other name than that of Mary;
though vulgar mortals called her Mary Joyce, holding her to be the
daughter of a well-to-do farmer at Glinton. John Clare made her
acquaintance--if so it can be called what was the merest dream-life
intercourse--on one of his periodical journeyings to and from the Maxey
mills. She sat on a style weaving herself a garland of flowers, and the
sight so enchanted him that he crouched down at a distance, afraid to
stir and to disturb the beautiful apparition. But she continuing to sit
and to weave her flowers, he drew nearer, and at last found courage to
speak to her. Mary did not reply; but her deep blue eyes smiled upon him,
lifting the humble worshipper of beauty into the seventh heaven of bliss.
And when he met her again, she again smiled; and he sat down at her feet
once more, and opened the long pent-up rivers of his heart. Mute to all
the world around him, he to her for the first time spoke of all he felt,