"See with splendor Phoebus rise, And with beauty tinge the skies. See the clouds of darkness fly Far beyond the Western sky; While the lark upsoaring sings, And the air with music rings; While the blackbird, linnet, thrush, Perched on yonder thorny bush, All unite in tuneful choir, And raise the happy music higher. While the murmuring busy bee, Pattern of wakeful industry, Flies from flower to flower to drain The choicest juice from sweetest vein; While the lowly cottage youth, His mind well stored with sacred truth, Rises, devout, his thanks to pay, And hails the welcome dawn of day. Oh, that 'twere mine, the happy lot, To dwell within the peaceful cot-- There rise, each morn, my thanks to pay, And hail the welcome dawn of day!" Cooper stayed with Clarke for a year and a half, and, after a brief interval, went to work with a "first-rate hand," who was known in the shoemaking fraternity as _Don_ Cundell. Here the youth, more expert at his craft than many of his companions, learned before the age of nineteen to make "a really good woman's shoe."[61] During this period he seems to have settled in good earnest alike to his daily occupation and the work of self-culture. Under the guidance of a friend named Macdonald, who lent him books, he read such works as Robertson's "Histories of Scotland," "America," and "Charles the Fifth," Neale's "History of the Puritans," and a little theology. Like multitudes of youths in a position similar to his, Thomas Cooper derived much benefit from a Mutual Improvement Society which was started in Gainsborough about this time by a friend of his, a draper's assistant named Joseph Foulkes Winks. In this society papers were read and discussions held on all imaginable subjects, literary, historical, and religious. "This weekly essay-writing," he says, "was an employment which absorbed a good deal of my thought, and was a good induction into the writing of prose, and into a mode of expressing one's thoughts." On one occasion a prize was offered for the best essay on "The Worst King of England." The tug of war lay between Winks, who chose as his subject James II., and Cooper, who eventually was adjudged the victor, and had taken William the Conqueror as his ideal of a bad king. The friendship thus commenced in amicable rivalry lasted, as we shall see, through life. Not content with self-improvement, these youths, with Macdonald and Wood, banded themselves together in a resolve to instruct others less favored than themselves, and an "Adult School" was formed. This was one of the first if not the first school of the kind in Lincolnshire, and must have proved a great benefit to the illiterate poor of the town, for by the end of the following year, when this branch was admitted into "The Adult Schools Society," the numbers on the books were 324. Friendships with two other young men brought such books in his way as Sibley's famous