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Updated: May 16, 2025
He advised John Clare to seek work immediately, either as a farm-labourer or lime-burner, and to devote only his spare time to the writing of verses. As to the verses already written, he promised to lay them before other judges, and to publish them, at any rate, more or less corrected and altered.
Next morning the lime-burner discovered a marble heart floating on the surface of the seething lime. This was the unpardonable sin, to have a cold, unfeeling heart. Such allegories make a more lasting impression than many sermons. His note-books also are of great value, especially the American ones.
And it seemed to little Joe a timorous and imaginative child that the silent forest was holding its breath until some fearful thing should happen. Ethan Brand thrust more wood into the fire, and closed the door of the kiln; then looking over his shoulder at the lime-burner and his son, he bade, rather than advised, them to retire to rest. "For myself, I cannot sleep," said he.
Then, whispering one to another that it was late, that the moon was almost down,-that the August night was growing chill, they hurried homewards, leaving the lime-burner and little Joe to deal as they might with their unwelcome guest. Save for these three human beings, the open space on the hill-side was a solitude, set in a vast gloom of forest.
As it whirled by, the driver shouted something at a stalwart forgeron, standing at the doorway of his smithy, and he passed it on to a loitering mealman and a lime-burner. A girl came slowly over the crest of a hill. Feeling her way with a stick, she paused now and then to draw in long breaths of sweet air from the meadows, as if in the joy of Nature she found a balm for the cruelties of Destiny.
"But suppose they fired at us 'stead of at His Excellency?" asked the mealman. "Then, mealman, you'd settle your account for lightweights sooner than you want." Duclosse twisted his mouth dubiously. He was not sure how far his enthusiasm would carry him. Muroc shook his shaggy head in mirth. "Well, 'tis true we're getting off to France," said the lime-burner.
"Yes," growled the lime-burner, with an oath, "but he has let the fire go down, and no thanks to him if five hundred bushels of lime are not spoiled. If I catch the fellow hereabouts again, I shall feel like tossing him into the furnace!" With his long pole in his hand, he ascended to the top of the kiln. After a moment's pause, he called to his son. "Come up here, Joe!" said he.
But I found not there what I sought. No, not the Unpardonable Sin!" "What is the Unpardonable Sin?" asked the lime-burner; and then he shrank farther from his companion, trembling lest his question should be answered. "It is a sin that grew within my own breast," replied Ethan Brand, standing erect with a pride that distinguishes all enthusiasts of his stamp. "A sin that grew nowhere else!
The inmates of the asylum treated Clare with the greatest respect far greater than that previously allotted to him by the world without. To his fellow-sufferers he always was John Clare the poet; never Clare the farm-labourer or the lime-burner.
The lime-burner sat watching him, and half suspected this strange guest of a purpose, if not to evoke a fiend, at least to plunge into the flames, and thus vanish from the sight of man. Ethan Brand, however, drew quietly back, and closed the door of the kiln. "I have looked," said he, "into many a human heart that was seven times hotter with sinful passions than yonder furnace is with fire.
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