Heber continued to prosper in business, working in his pottery in summer, and at his forge in winter. He purchased land, built houses, planted orchards, and otherwise "situated himself to live comfortably."
In the spring of 1825, he gave his father a home with him in Mendon. The old gentleman was now a widower, his wife, Heber's mother, having died in February, 1824, at West Bloomfield, of consumption. Her husband survived her a little over a twelve-month, when he, too, fell a victim to the same malady.
It is a coincidence worthy of note that the deaths of Heber and Vilate were also about one year apart, she passing away first, and he, like his father, following soon the footsteps of his beloved partner to the spirit land.
We have traced his life's record through its initial stages. He was now fairly on the threshold of his remarkable career.
CHAPTER III.
HEBER'S POETIC NATURE—A ROUGH DIAMOND—EARLY RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE—JOINS THE BAPTIST CHURCH—"SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS ABOVE"—HEBER C. KIMBALL AND BRIGHAM YOUNG—THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL.
Heber's temperament was religious and poetical. Sociable as he was, and even bubbling over with mirth, at times, his soul was essentially of a solemn cast. He loved solitude, not with the selfish spirit of the misanthrope, but for the opportunities it gave of communing with his own thoughts—a pleasure that only poet minds truly feel—and of listening to the voice of God and nature, expressed in all the countless and varied forms of life.
He was capable of sensing fully—though probably he had never seen or heard—those sublime words of the poet:
"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods;
There is a rapture on the lonely shore;
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar.
I love not man the less, but nature more,
From these our interviews; in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the universe and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal."
True, he was a diamond in the rough, but a diamond, nevertheless, for all of its incrustations. Unlettered and untaught, save in nature's school, the university of experience, where he was an apt and profound scholar, he was possessed of marvelous intuition, a genius God-given, which needed no kindling at a college shrine to prepare it for the work which providence had designed.