Richard must have been too young to ever have heard Wesley preach, but he certainly heard Gilbert and he certainly journeyed the fifteen miles to worship in Heathfield. In the Independent congregation there he met the Oxley family. The father, William Oxley, was a respectable tradesman, descended from the iron-founders for whom Heathfield was once famous. He was moderately prosperous, for he owned at least four cottages, three of which he rented out. His eldest daughter, Mary, named after her mother, was the girl who attracted Richard’s attentions even though she was eighteen months older than himself.

Whether an instant physical attraction and a deep, sensual passion sprang up between them immediately, or whether there was a more slowly ripening mutual love is not known. However it began, it lasted until Mary’s death, over fifty years later.

Only one small profile portrait of Mary survives, and that was drawn when she was 40, but there is enough in it to suggest that as a girl she had sufficient good looks to catch a young man’s eye. A grand-daughter later recalled her as a petite, soft-spoken lady who, stroking the girl’s hair, told her, “Don’t knit, dear. Knitting’s not genteel.” What must have appealed strongly to Richard was that she was educated and, of course, a Congregationalist. For her part, the new young man in her life was presentable, deeply religious and very well read and his father was a man of some standing, both social and financial, in Alfriston. He would make a dependable husband and father for her future family.

As far as Richard’s poetry was concerned, this was in some degree a grave disadvantage. His later writing shows that he was at his most natural and best when he wrote in dialect, the tongue of his childhood, but to an earnest-minded young man with an enormous respect for the great classical English poets, the Sussex dialect was not the language in which to deal with such momentous issues as religion, love and marriage. It was too common, too coarse. If he ever read any of Robert Burns’s poems, he never absorbed the lesson that it is the ideas, the imagery, the juxtapositioning of words that make fine poetry, not the particular dialect in which they are written. The poems he wrote to Mary after they were married have survived; those he wrote before have not. Surely, though, there were some, and almost certainly they were couched in the same language as his later Standard English verse – cleverly rhyming, properly scanning, displaying a wide vocabulary and knowledge of the Classics, but lacking that magic that creates the true poetry that Burns could achieve in one simple line: ‘My luv is like a red, red, rose’. Richard himself never saw it this way. He did not even put his own name to his later dialect verse; but it is the latter that made him famous and which later generations found attractive. Mary, however, probably felt flattered by the verse he wrote to her. At any rate she accepted his proposal of marriage.