'When the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world
Hung not upon the beatings of our hearts.'
'We felt something,' he adds, 'of
"That blessed mood
In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened: that serene and blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead us on."
At the end of his Derbyshire journal he says that 'the remembrance of those happy days in Derbyshire will lie in the landscape of his memory, like spots of stationary sunshine; they will be to him and his friend as wells of pure water amid desert sands to which their souls may fly for refreshment hereafter in hours of weariness amid the din of towns and cities and the many shapes of joyless delight.'
Did ever city man take back to city roar and barrenness more quiet and more profit from a country ramble?
In his last letter to Thomas Smith, he spoke of having left the Manchester neighbourhood. In the autumn of 1820 he gave up his work in the Manchester Bank. He never could think of his native vale without a sense of heartsickness; his work was irksome and city life hateful. In his poem to the river Winster dated 1821, he writes:
'And in the heavy time of after life,
When buried in the midst of toil and strife
In trading towns, if intermission sweet
I sought from my dull toil, my fancy fleet
Was straight amid thy vernal meads and flowers,
Thy hanging fields, wild woods, and leafy bowers.
Nor could I think of beauty on this earth,
But still 'twas seen with thee—as if thy birth
And mine had been together. Now at ease
And free to wander whereso'er I please,
What charms I find along thy simple stream,
Beloved Winster!'
It is no wonder that a yeoman farmer's son who could thus write, should have felt irresistibly drawn from exile in Manchester to his native vale, and we find him back at the Yews, in correspondence, now with the editor of a county paper, now with Miss Wordsworth, now writing a ballad or a poem, now a natural history note, now wandering off down Duddon Vale, and through the Lake District, and now keenly interested in a little dilapidated estate in the Crosthwaite township called sometimes Borderside, sometimes Balderside, or perhaps more accurately in Viking phrase, Bauta-side, and determining to go into the farming line.
He became purchaser of the Borderside estate in 1822; at once he determined to let it for five years, and gave his whole time and the rent to boot, to the improvement of it.
In the summer of the same year that he became an estatesman, he planned a tour into Scotland. Wordsworth wrote him a full and particular itinerary, and William Pearson followed the footsteps of the bard, and really made the same journey as Wordsworth's first excursion to Scotland.