I long to be with thee, but cannot tell how;
Wert thou but the elder that grows on thy dairy,
And I the blest woodbine to twine on the bough,
I'd embrace thee and cling to thee ever, my Mary!"
Mary Joyce listened to the tale of love his stammering, artless tongue poured forth; but when her father heard of it, he forbade her ever to speak to "that beggar boy" again. It was not his poverty so much as his poetry that caused Farmer Joyce to talk of him so harshly. John moved in a most eccentric orbit, and the sight of him running after the cows, book in hand, or declaiming to himself by the wayside, his clothes in tatters, and his long hair streaming in the wind, produced the very natural impression that he was half silly and never would come to any good.
Mary was obedient, but remained a spinster to her dying day; as to John, the disappointment warped his life. It was his first deep sorrow, never, never to be forgotten. His penknife carved the initials of her name inside the porch of Glinton Church, but love carved that name still deeper on his heart. Half a century later it was the only memory that survived when all else had gone to wreck.
It was just at this juncture, when love had thus stirred up the fount of feeling, that he met with Thomson's "Seasons." Coming back from Stamford, where he had been to buy the book, the purchase-money, eighteenpence, having been made up partly by pence extracted from his mother, and partly by loans from friendly villagers, his path lay through Burghley Park, and what with the loveliness of the scene, and the joy of having a real poetry book, his soul burst forth for the first time into song, and found expression in verse.
Parker Clare had a love for gardening; it would have suited him better than ploughing or threshing. It was too late now to change his occupation, but nothing could be better for John; so when he heard that the head-gardener at Burghley wanted an apprentice, it aroused every latent spark of ambition in the poor man's breast, and he determined to lose no time in trying to secure the place for his son. With much obsequiousness, the pair waited on the great man, and he, pleased at being treated with such deference, took a fancy to the boy, and consented to employ him.
