CHILDHOOD AT COATE FARM 43 



he learned about Time there must have been many 

 moments like that which lingered to inspire such pas- 

 sages as that in ' Round about a Great Estate,' where 

 the damask rose opens its petals, the strawberries are ripe, 

 and ' young Aaron ' turns the blue-painted barrel-chum, 

 while the finches call in the plum-trees. Not yet had his 

 father's and mother's moods the enduring excuse that the 

 farm was going surely to the bad ; not yet had James 

 Jefferies, his father dead, and all hope of more help de- 

 parted, begun to let things that were wrong go yet more 

 wrong, to mortgage the farm, and to dream, until he had 

 to leave and become a gardener in Bath. His mother 

 was often gay, and his father genial and at ease in his 

 garden, and in these big, early, silent spaces of life the 

 boy's soul could turn about and grow. It was, perhaps, 

 at the age of fifteen — * so long since that I have forgotten 

 the date,' as he wrote in 1883 — that he used to go every 

 morning, where, hidden by elm-trees, he could see the sun 

 rise, or watch the early eastern sky : 



' Involuntarily I drew a long breath, then I breathed 

 slowly. My thought, or inner consciousness, went up 

 through the illumined sky, and I was lost in a moment of 

 exaltation. This only lasted a very short time, perhaps 

 only part of a second, and while it lasted there was no 

 formulated wish. I was absorbed ; I drank the beauty of 

 the morning ; I was exalted.' 



At or near the same time came those richer growths of 

 the dream state and extended, if not ' cosmic,' conscious- 

 ness ' mentioned in ' Bevis,' where, too, he speaks of the 

 exact position of the rising sun, * between the young oak 

 and the third group of elms ' : — 



' The sward on the path on which Bevis used to lie and 

 gaze up in the summer evening was real and tangible ; 

 the earth under was real ; and so, too, the elms, the oak, 

 the ash-trees, were real and tangible — things to be 

 touched, and known to be. Now, like these, the mind, 

 stepping from the one to the other, knew and almost felt 

 the stars to be real, and not mere specks of light, but 



