Page:The English Peasant.djvu/308

 soul of a poet, yearning after the beautiful. He was a silent, solitary child, loving the companionship of flowers and purling brooks better than that of his rough and noisy playmates—a sort of fondling of Dame Nature, feeling only happy in her arms, and when she was unfolding some of her beauteous stores for his delectation

He was like "the child" in "The Story without an End." His dearest friends dwelt in the woods, the fields, the hedges, and on the banks of the gurgling rivulets. Among such scenes "there was no end to his delight. The little birds warbled and sang, and fluttered and hopped about, and the delicate wood flowers gave out their beauty and their odours ; and every sweet sound took a sweet odour by the hand, and thus walked through the open door of the child's heart, and held a joyous nuptial dance therein." Nevertheless, his soul was human, and his eye and his heart were just as open to the lights and sounds, the manner of life and mode of thought, which marked the simple swains among whom he lived and died. That village life was imprinted like a series of never-fading photographs on his mind. And although the light of his genius could not help seizing upon everything capable of forming a picture and irradiating it, just as the sunlight fills even ugly things with its own glow of beauty ; nevertheless, the continued wretchedness and unmerited suffering of the life around him burnt so deeply into his young heart, that no personal acts of kindness he hereafter experienced — and they were innumerable from high and low—could ever wring from him one note of joy for being, born an Englishman, or, in fact, for being born at all.

"As most of Nature's children prove to be, His little soul was easy made to smart, His tear was quickly born to sympathy, And soon were rous'd the feelings of his heart, In others' woes and wants to bear a part.