WILLIAM PEARSON OF BORDERSIDE.
It is a pleasant thing for a Cumberland Crosthwaite man to have to speak of a man of the Westmoreland Crosthwaite. It is a special pleasure when one realises how Cumberland helped Westmoreland to give us the gentle mind and life of enthusiasm for Truth and Nature which closed here at Borderside, with 'unbroken trust in God,' and 'in hope of immortal life,' on the 16th December, 1856.
I have read no life that seems to have been so genuinely the fruit of enthusiasm for the poet Wordsworth as was the life of William Pearson. He was ten years the junior of the poet, and survived him six years. We may nevertheless look upon him as a contemporary. He was of the same kind of North yeoman stock, and with greater opportunities might have made himself a name in the annals of literature. As it is, like Elihu Robinson of Egglesfield, like Wilkinson of Yanwath, like the late Wilson Robinson of Winfell, Lorton, Pearson's name was not known far beyond his native valley, but of him, as of the others named, it is truth to say that he was a living monument of what 'the soul of Nature,' if it be received into the heart of man, can do to elevate, to strengthen and refine. Of none other in his simple estatesman rank that I have read of can it be more truly said, that from:
'... Nature and her overflowing soul
He had received so much, that all his thoughts
Were steeped in feeling.'
Wordsworth once wrote that 'Nature never did betray the heart that loved her'; William Pearson proved by all he said and did that Wordsworth spoke the truth. Wordsworth spoke felicitously of the
'Harvest of a quiet eye
That sleeps and broods on its own heart.'
William Pearson gathered that harvest to the full, ere he too, like a shock of corn, was in a full time garnered. Wordsworth declared that
'Who feels contempt for any living thing
Hath faculties that he hath never used,'