When I was living in the country, the pure sky and the landscape formed a large portion of my existence, so large that much of myself depended on it, and I wondered how men could be worth anything if they could never see the face of nature.  For this belief my early training on the “Lyrical Ballads” is answerable.  When I came to London the same creed survived, and I was for ever thirsting for intercourse with my ancient friend.  Hope, faith, and God seemed impossible amidst the smoke of the streets.  It was now very difficult for me, except at rare opportunities, to leave London, and it was necessary for me, therefore, to understand that all that was essential for me was obtainable there, even though I should never see anything more than was to be seen in journeying through the High Street, Camden Town, Tottenham Court Road, the Seven Dials, and Whitehall.  I should have been guilty of a simple surrender to despair if I had not forced myself to make this discovery.  I cannot help saying, with all my love for the literature of my own day, that it has an evil side to it which none know except the millions of sensitive persons who are condemned to exist in great towns.  It might be imagined from much of this literature that true humanity and a belief in God are the offspring of the hills or the ocean; and by implication, if not expressly, the vast multitudes who hardly ever see the hills or the ocean must be without a religion.  The long poems which turn altogether upon scenery, perhaps in foreign lands, and the passionate devotion to it which they breathe, may perhaps do good in keeping alive in the hearts of men a determination to preserve air, earth, and water from pollution; but speaking from experience as a Londoner, I can testify that they are most depressing, and I would counsel everybody whose position is what mine was to avoid these books and to associate with those which will help him in his own circumstances.

Half of my occupation soon came to an end.  One of my editors sent me a petulant note telling me that all I wrote he could easily find out himself, and that he required something more “graphic and personal.”  I could do no better, or rather I ought to say, no worse than I had been doing.  These letters were a great trouble to me.  I was always conscious of writing so much of which I was not certain, and so much which was indifferent to me.  The unfairness of parties haunted me.  But I continued to write, because I saw no other way of getting a living, and surely it is a baser dishonesty to depend upon the charity of friends because some pleasant, clean, ideal employment has not presented itself, than to soil one’s hands with a little of the inevitable mud.  I don’t think I ever felt anything more keenly than I did a sneer from an acquaintance of mine who was in the habit of borrowing money from me.  He was a painter, whose pictures were never sold because he never worked hard enough to know how to draw, and it came to my ears