About this time, too, he showed tendencies in two directions, which were strongly developed subsequently, and, in fact, formed the main features of his character in after-years. The conversation of certain working-men politicians in a neighboring brush manufactory, and the loan of "Hone's Caricatures" and "The News," set him off in the direction of _politics_, and made him, of course, a disciple of Radicalism. But the other change in the current of his thoughts, which came a little later on, was more important, if not more profound and lasting. Deeply emotional and imaginative as a child, having also a strong sense of moral right and wrong, he was easily moved by religious appeals. A band of Primitive Methodists having come to the town, he was caught up by their enthusiasm and zeal, and resolved to join them. After much religious emotion, ending in no very settled state of mind, he left them and united with the Wesleyan Methodists, whose services and preaching were more to his mind. This brings us up to the time of his leaving school at the age of fifteen, and his entrance on the sterner work of life as a shoemaker. True, he had not done anything very marvellous at present, but he had fine abilities, a warm emotional nature, a rare poetic taste, a thorough craving for books, and no little perseverance and industry. Good Mrs. Cooper, therefore, showed something more than a mother's fond fancy when she said, "The Lord's will be done; I don't think He intends thee to spend thy life at shoemaking." The society in John Clarke's garret, where young Cooper sat down to learn his trade, was, like that of many similar places, rather literary. This man Clarke, true to the reputation of the followers of St. Crispin, was thoughtful and fond of reading. The conversation ran on the poetry of Shakespeare and Byron, and the acting of Kemble and Young and Mrs. Siddons--the stars of that day in the theatrical world. One of the fruits of this new poetic impulse was Cooper's first poem, made one spring morning in his fifteenth year, as he walked in the fields near Gainsborough. Quoting this short piece in his Autobiography, he says: "I give it here, be it remembered, as the first literary feat of a self-educated boy of fifteen. I say self-educated, so far as I was educated. Mine has been almost entirely self-education all the way through life." Great merit or promise is not claimed for these lines, yet they are worth quoting, if only for the sake of comparing them with the first attempt of another young shoemaker, Bloomfield.[60] [60] See above, p. 96. A MORNING IN SPRING.