'and intertwine The passions that build up our human soul Not with the mean and vulgar works of man But with high objects and enduring things.' He also knew how Wordsworth taught men the secret of the gentle heart, 'Never to blend its pleasure or its pride, With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.' It was this knowledge that soon made him love rather to watch a wild bird than shoot it. One is not surprised therefore to find him constantly referring to Wordsworth's writings, and yet to feel him so eminent as a man that years after, though communing in spirit with {127} him day by day, he could not summon courage to go up the path to Rydal Mount, and abashed at his own boldness for venturing to call, came away from the door of the Rydal poet, without seeing his hero, like a thing ashamed. It was owing to mutual love and admiration for Wordsworth's poetry that he found in a poor Gorton silk-weaver, Thomas Smith by name, so congenial a companion. The last six years of Pearson's life at Manchester can chiefly be known from the letters that passed between these two friends, which towards the end seem almost to degenerate into a series of begging letters from a poor weaver out of work and 'thrice dispirited.' But this at any rate is seen in their correspondence, that even in abject poverty high thinking is possible, and Wordsworth's poems seem to be medicine for the mind; while on the other hand there is always the ready and generous response of the yeoman of Winster Vale, and such delicacy in act of gift as makes one feel how finely strung, how nobly sensitive was the mind of the benefactor. Pearson sends Thomas Smith a copy of _The Excursion_. 'Your tidings about Wordsworth,' says the poor weaver, under date of April 15, {128} 1821, 'I will not call him Mr., he is too great for that, were good tidings indeed; his _Excursion_ I have been longing for ever since it was first published, but the price has been an unsurmountable obstacle to a weaver.' The two friends unbosom their hearts to one another in these letters, and there is seen something of the deep religious side of Pearson's character in some of them. 'I cannot,' he writes to Smith in 1831, 'conclude without a word about what you write of your being unhappy. Read your Bible. Trust in that Good Being who gave you your existence. Consider the many in your situation who from ignorance and want of education have not the arguments of hope that you have; ... only the wicked need be unhappy; at anyrate do not despair.' And again in 1838, 'I wish I could console you under your troubles. Be thankful you have not a guilty conscience--the greatest of evils. Read your Bible, read Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Milton. Do you go to worship, public, I mean? You have a chapel at the foot of your hill, join yourself to them.'