But it was ill for him that in his fastidiousness and touchiness he had shut himself out from that world, till he had quite forgotten how much good there was in it as well as evil; how many people--commonplace and unpoetical it may be--but still heroical in God's sight, were working harder than he ever worked, at the divine drudgery of doing good, and that in dens of darkness and sloughs of filth, from which he would have turned with disgust; so that the sympathy with the sinful and fallen which marks his earlier poems, and which perhaps verges on sentimentalism, gradually gives place to a Pharisaic and contemptuous tone; a tone more lofty and manful in seeming, but far less divine in fact.

Perhaps comparative success had injured him.

Whilst struggling himself against circumstances, poor, untaught, unhappy, he had more fellow-feeling, with those whom circumstance oppressed.

At least, the pity which he could once bestow upon the misery which he met in his daily walks, he now kept for the more picturesque woes of Italy and Greece.
In this, too, he was weak; that he had altogether forgotten that the fire from off the altar could only be kept alight by continual self-restraint and self-sacrifice, by continual gentleness and humility, shown in the petty matters of everyday home-life; and that he who cannot rule his own household can never rule the Church of God.
And so it befell, that amid the little cross-blasts of home squabbles the sacred spark was fast going out.

The poems written after he settled at Penalva are marked by a less definite purpose, by a lower tone of feeling: not, perhaps, by a lower moral tone; but simply by less of any moral tone at all.