“A sensitive being, a creative soul.”
The restoration, the sanative process I speak of, showed itself in two directions, as regards his feeling towards man and towards Nature.
First as to man: his interests and sympathies, stimulated to excess by the political convulsions he had passed through, now found healthier objects in the laboring poor whom he conversed with in the fields, and in the vagrants he met on lonely roads. These became his daily schools. In many an exquisite poem he has embalmed the incidents and characters he saw or heard of at that time. His early upbringing combined with after experience and reflection to make him esteem simple and humble life more than artificial. The homely ways of the people he had spent his boyhood with—village dames, hardy dalesmen and shepherds—concurred with his own native bias to make him love and esteem what is permanent, not what is accidental in human life, the inner, not the outer man of men, the essential soul, not its trappings of birth, fortune, and position. This native bias had been deepened by all he had seen, felt, and thought during the revolutionary ferment, and now became the fixed habit and purpose of his mind, part of his permanent self. For in humble men, when not wholly crushed or hardened by penury, he seemed to see the primary passions and elementary feelings of human nature existing as it were in their native bed—freer, stronger, more unalloyed than in men of so-called position and education, who, as he thought, were often overlaid by artifice and conventionality. The formalities which pass by the name of education he thought have little to do with real feeling and just sense, and intercourse with the talking world does little to improve men. He therefore turned away from artificial to natural man, and resolved to let the world know what he had seen and found in men and women whose outside was least attractive.
“Of these, said I, shall be my song, of these
Will I record the praises, making verse;
Deal boldly with substantial things, in truth
And sanctity of passion, speak of these
That justice may be done, obeisance paid
Where it is due.”
Much more might be said of his views of man, as they ultimately became, for his insight into the heart and its workings, though confined to certain lines, and reflective, not dramatic, was within these lines true and deep.