There was no suitable house for the happy couple in Crosthwaite, and after staying at Low House for the winter, he went into lodgings at High Crag. Lodgings were not William Pearson's ideal of home life, and though he was a man of sixty-seven he determined in 1847 to build a house on his own estate.
It was a glad day for him when, as he tells us, on the last day of July, 1848, he crept into the bosom of his own cheerful cot 'with measureless content,' a cottage 'unclothed by rough-cast,' as he told Wordsworth, 'but exhibiting a goodly row of chimneys with pretty round tops on square pedestals, the only specimens yet in Crosthwaite of the revived good old fashion.'
We have a poet's description of this Borderside home from the pen of Perceval Graves, who, writing from Dovenest in 1862, thus describes it:
'Red roses flush its native stone,
The grassy slope, the rocky mount
Are gay with flowers,—a shadowy fount
Murmurs with cool delicious tone.
Beneath, an orchard far and wide
Its blossom on its front displays;
Across the valley friendly rays
From neighbour houses hail Borderside.'
Here for the next eight years dwelt the refined and thoughtful yeoman, reading such books as he felt he could afford to buy, such books as he could borrow from Kendal, or were lent him by Coleridge or Perceval Graves or Wordsworth; corresponding with such naturalists as Waterton and Gough, such students as Perceval Graves and Dr. Davy, keeping up constant communion with the friends at Rydal Mount; getting hold of the best that could be had of the scientific treatises of the day; dipping here and there into theologic problems; studying his Shakespeare and his Milton, enjoying his Carlyle, his Burns, and his Scott, his Reed's English Literature, impressing, when he met him, such a man as Sir William Hamilton, examining the theories of Agazziz and Brewster as to moraine and glacier action, comparing his own natural history observations with those of Waterton and White of Selborne; and from time to time, when he had returned from some ride on 'Nep' or 'Camel,' his favourite ponies, sitting down to chronicle the beauty of the day's outing, or the wild life of bird and beast he had observed. Amongst the latter must be noted his papers on the partridge and the squirrel, in 1846; on the woodgrouse, that 'new bird' which appears to have come to Colthouse first in the autumn of 1845 (this paper was written in 1850), and again on the hagworm, 1852; 'Notes on Characters and Habits of Domestic Animals, 1854'; and 'A few Recent Notices in Natural History, 1855.'
All Pearson's prose has a dignity and simplicity and directness that makes one realise he had been a reader of the masters of English style, but it makes one feel also that he is a poet at heart, as he writes his prose. Take for example his account of the glede or kite—alas! long vanished from our land, though nesting at the ferry as late as the beginning of last century;—'I have seen,' says he, 'the glede and his beautiful flight, no words of mine can adequately describe it. It was on a windy day in autumn or winter that he generally made his appearance. Imagine a bird measuring five feet between the tips of his wings. To glide along it required apparently no mechanical effort, no fluttering of the wings, not the tremor of a feather. It was not flying but sailing on the bosom of the air, as if by an effort of the will, such ease, such grace, such dignity.'
The evenings at Borderside were spent in reading. A mellow musical voice with much feeling in it, would render a passage from some favourite poet, and as often as not the old man's voice would falter and he would say, 'I cannot go on,' and with tears rolling down his cheeks he would put the book down. Perceval Graves, his great friend of the later years, would ofttimes come over for high discourse and heart communion from Dovenest to Borderside. He described those pleasant visits thus:
'And when our cheerful meal was o'er,
A meal which friendship seemed to bless
And elegance and homeliness
With charm we scarce had known before.
How swiftly flew the hours away,
As thought and feeling deeply stored
By mind and heart all forth were poured
In loving faith and lively play!'
The summer of 1856 was memorable for a waterspout that fell in hay-time on the 8th of August, upon Carnigill, near Borrow Bridge; we who travel by the L.N.W.R. from Tebay to the south can still see the wounds upon the mountain side the fury of the torrent made. The phenomenon was minutely described by the old meteorologist in a letter to Mr. Davy. It was the last August he would see.