Two main interests mark this time. He was engaged to be married, and he was at the well-spring of the Oxford Movement. He spent his Sundays at Maidenhead with Marquita Proctor, on the river, seeing churches and sketching; he spent his working days at Wantage.
“Mr. Street, having no special ties to any locality, desired to live at Wantage where daily service and weekly celebration had been established at a time when such were rare. He took, therefore, in conjunction with Mr. Stillingfleet--one of the clergy of the parish--a little house in Wallingford Street. During the time he lived there I saw him almost daily.” This is Dr. William Butler, later Dean of Lincoln. “When not called from Wantage on business, he regularly attended my service, and took his part in the choir. He had, I remember, a baritone voice, and took a tenor part. He was much interested in the improvement of services, and, although at this time far from wealthy, he offered a large annual subscription, I think it was £20, toward the payment of an organist.... Never was there a man of simpler or less luxurious habits. In those two years he dined with us and the clergy of the parish, he drank no wine, and had only the plainest food.”
It was an energetic wholesome life, simple not so much by limitation as by renunciation, full of interest and expression, keeping a right line, as always, by the force of the initial impulse. The energetic, wholesome figure stands firm in a clear sunlight that is hardly dimmed by the space of sixty-odd years intervening. With nothing of the prig, as little of the aesthete, he was alien to both types by virtue of his vitality, his mirth, his essential soundness. A daguerreotype taken about 1850 shows quiet strength with a sort of sweet gravity. The hands are strong and flexible, not large, with tapering fingers and fine modelling on the back. You would have turned in the street to look after the head, with a big square brow jutting over blue eyes, brown hair very soft and round chin very firm, a mouth poetic and self-controlled. If poetry were (as once was rashly said) merely an affair of genius, and genius the affair of energy, Street would have been infallibly a poet. Energy and beauty in him were mingled in unusual measure, and he found expression in active more than in abstract creation: in loving landscape and sketching it, in hearing music and singing it, in building Gothic churches and restoring them.