Tempest," which he had bought at a broker's shop in Oundle. This
brings us down to 1812, when Clare was nineteen years old.

Little is known of Clare's manner of life for the next four or five
years, excepting that he continued to work as a farm labourer
whenever work could be found, that he tried camp life with some
gipsies, and speedily had his romantic ideas of its attractiveness
rudely dispelled, that he had a love passage or two with girls of the
village and that he accumulated a large number of poems of varying
degrees of excellence.

In 1817 he obtained employment as a lime burner at Bridge Casterton,
in the neighbouring county of Rutland, where he earned about ten
shillings per week. The labour was very severe, but Clare was
contented, and during his stay at Bridge Casterton several of the
best among his earlier poems were produced. It was probably this
period of his life which he had in his mind when he said:--

I found the poems in the fields,
And only wrote them down.

In the course of this year 1817 Clare fell in love with Martha
Turner, the daughter of a cottage farmer living at a place called
Walkherd Lodge, and this is the maiden who after the lapse of three
or four years became his wife. "She was a fair girl of eighteen,
slender, with regular features, and pretty blue eyes." Clare entered
into this new engagement with passionate ardour, but the courtship
ultimately took a more prosaic turn, and having once done so, there
was little in the worthy but illiterate and matter-of-fact "Patty" to
elevate the connection into the region of poetry. In his