202 THE EULOGY OF RICHARD JEFFERIES. 



his highest point. There are plenty of single 

 pages and detached passages in which he has 

 equalled the u Pageant of Summer ;" but there 

 is no one chapter, no single article, in which 

 he has sustained throughout the elevation of 

 this noble paper. I will return to " The 

 Pageant of Summer " later on. 



Although he wrote this paper while in dire 

 straits of poverty; although he had already 

 entered that valley whose gloomy sides con- 

 tinually narrow; where the slopes become, 

 little by little, precipices ; where the light 

 grows dim, and where the spectre of death 

 slowly rises before the eyes and takes shape : 

 although he lived poorly ; although he con- 

 tinued unknown to the mass of the reading 

 world, who passed him by, everything, to us, 

 seems compensated by the splendid power which 

 he had now acquired of thinking such thoughts 

 and expressing them in such language. I 

 have heard it said by some that Jefferies wrote 

 too much. Not a single page too much, 

 beginning from the " Gamekeeper at Home," 

 and thinking only of the " Gamekeeper's " 

 legitimate successors ! That is to say, we are 



