When Smith lay dying, Pearson wrote a letter full of tender sympathy. 'So long as reason and memory remain, I shall never forget {129} the many delightful hours we have passed together, whether in reading some favourite poet or rambling among the beautiful scenes of Nature.' 'I believe,' he added, 'that seldom have two persons come together more in sympathy than we two, and I have often felt that my separation from you was one of my greatest losses in leaving your part of the country.' Those rambles he mentions were walking-tours he took in 1817 through Derbyshire, and in 1818 in the Craven country of Yorkshire. He kept journals, and full of delightful observation of men and things they are, redolent of real joy in sunshine and cloud. He writes, 'We walked forward on this delightful morning with vigorous steps. The lark was our constant companion, cheering us overhead with her song, the fresh air of the mountains bathed our cheeks, there was freedom from care and the feeling of liberty 'When the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world Hung not upon the beatings of our hearts.' 'We felt something,' he adds, 'of "That blessed mood In which the burden of the mystery, {130} In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lightened: that serene and blessed mood In which the affections gently lead us on." At the end of his Derbyshire journal he says that 'the remembrance of those happy days in Derbyshire will lie in the landscape of his memory, like spots of stationary sunshine; they will be to him and his friend as wells of pure water amid desert sands to which their souls may fly for refreshment hereafter in hours of weariness amid the din of towns and cities and the many shapes of joyless delight.' Did ever city man take back to city roar and barrenness more quiet and more profit from a country ramble? In his last letter to Thomas Smith, he spoke of having left the Manchester neighbourhood. In the autumn of 1820 he gave up his work in the Manchester Bank. He never could think of his native vale without a sense of heartsickness; his work was irksome and city life hateful. In his poem to the river Winster dated 1821, he writes: 'And in the heavy time of after life, When buried in the midst of toil and strife In trading towns, if intermission sweet I sought from my dull toil, my fancy fleet {131} Was straight amid thy vernal meads and flowers, Thy hanging fields, wild woods, and leafy bowers. Nor could I think of beauty on this earth, But still 'twas seen with thee--as if thy birth And mine had been together. Now at ease And free to wander whereso'er I please, What charms I find along thy simple stream, Beloved Winster!'