listened to at eighteen!

The girl resolved to marry her lover with or without leave; and as for
Parker Clare, he needed no permission, his mother, dependent for years
upon the cold charity of the workhouse, having long ceased to control his
doings. Thus it followed that in the autumn of 1792, when Robespierre was
ruling France, and William Pitt England, young Parker Clare was married
to Ann Stimson of Castor. Seven months after, on the 13th day of July,
1793, Parker Clare's wife was delivered, prematurely, of twins, a boy and
a girl. The girl was healthy and strong; but the boy looked weak and
sickly in the extreme. It seemed not possible that the boy could live,
therefore the mother had him baptized immediately, calling him John,
after her father. However, human expectations were not verified in the
twin children; the strong girl died in early infancy, while the sickly
boy lived--lived to be a poet.

Of _Poeta nascitur non fit_ there never was a truer instance than in the
case of John Clare. Impossible to imagine circumstances and scenes
apparently more adverse to poetic inspiration than those amidst which
John Clare was placed at his birth. His parents were the poorest of the
poor; their whole aim of life being engrossed by the one all-absorbing
desire to gain food for their daily sustenance. They lived in a narrow
wretched hut, low and dark, more like a prison than a human dwelling; and
the hut stood in a dark, gloomy plain, covered with stagnant pools of
water, and overhung by mists during the greater part of the year. Yet
from out these surroundings sprang a being to whom all life was golden,
and all nature a breath of paradise. John Clare was a poet almost as soon
as he awoke to consciousness. His young mind marvelled at all the
wonderful things visible in the wide world: the misty sky, the green
trees, the fish in the water, and the birds in the air. In all the things