254 FKESH 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- 



