He sought refuge from his own sensitive nature in abstruse meditations, and delighted most in those subjects requiring the full exercise of his intellectual powers, which never seemed fatigued — and in his early life never did sun shine on a more joyous being!
"[There] was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence fancy made me dreams of happiness:
For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seem'd mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth,
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of imagination.
For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man —
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul."[24]
It was indeed an inauspicious hour "when he changed his abode from the happy groves of Jesus' College to Bristol." But it was so ordained! He sought literature as a trade, — and became an author —
"whatever," he would say, "I write, that alone which contains the truth will live, for truth only is permanent. The rest will deservedly perish."
He wrote to supply the fountain which was to feed the fertilizing rills, — to develope the truth was that at which he aimed, and in which he hoped to find his reward.
On the 16th of September, 1798, he sailed from Great Yarmouth to Hamburg, in company with Mr. Wordsworth and his sister in his way to Germany, and now for the first time beheld "his native land" retiring from him.
In a series of letters, published first in the
Friend
, afterwards in his
Biographia Literaria,