254 FRESH FIELDS 



he saw every movement of the hand, every fall of 

 a leaf, as an emanation of solar energy. A " hag- 

 gard mood of the imagination" (his own phrase) 

 was habitual with him. He could see only the 

 tragical in life and in history. Events were immi- 

 nent, poised like avalanches that a word might 

 loosen. We see Jeffries perpetually amazed at his 

 earnestness, the gradations in his mind were so 

 steep; the descent from the thought to the deed 

 was so swift and inevitable that the witty advocate 

 came to look upon him as a man to be avoided. 



"Daily and hourly," he says (at the age of thirty- 

 eight), "the world natural grows more of a world 

 magical to me; this is as it should be. Daily, too, 

 I see that there is no true poetry but in reality, " 



"The gist of my whole way of thought," he says 

 again, "is to raise the natural to the supernatural." 

 To his brother John he wrote in 1832: "I get 

 more earnest, graver, not unhappier, every day. 

 The whole creation seems more and more divine to 

 me, the natural more and more supernatural." His 

 eighty-five years did not tame him at all, did not 

 blunt his conception of the "fearfulness and won- 

 derfulness of life." Sometimes an opiate or an 

 anaesthetic operates inversely upon a constitution, 

 and, instead of inducing somnolence, makes the per- 

 son wildly wakeful and sensitive. The anodyne of 

 life acted this way upon Carlyle, and, instead of 

 quieting or benumbing him, filled him with portent- 

 ous imaginings and fresh cause for wonder. There 

 is a danger that such a mind, if it takes to litera- 



