CHILDHOOD AT COATE FARM 49 



All this — the hunting, the reading, the brooding — was ^ 

 filling his brain, clearing and subtilizing his eye. The 

 clearness of the physical is allied to the penetration of 

 the spiritual vision. For both are nourished to their 

 perfect flowering by the habit of concentration. To see 

 a thing as clearly as he saw the sun-painted yellow- 

 hammer in Stewart's Mash is part of the office of the 

 imagination. Imagination is no more than the making 

 of graven images, whether of things on the earth or in 

 the mind. To make them, clear concentrated sight and 

 patient mind are the most necessary things after love ; and 

 these two are the children of love. With the majority, 

 love, accompanying and giving birth to imagination, 

 reaches its intensity only once, and that briefly, in a life- 

 time ; and if they are ever again to know imagination, 

 it is through fear, as when a tall flame shoots up before 

 the eyes, or through sudden pain or anger giving their 

 faces an honest energy of expression, and their lips, per- 

 haps, a power of telling speech. Yet more rare is the 

 power of repeating these images by music or language or 

 carved stone. It is those who can do so who alone are, 

 as a rule, aware that human life, nature, and art are every 

 moment continuing and augmenting the Creation — making 

 to-day the first day, and this field Eden, annihilating time 

 — so that each moment all things are fresh and the sun 

 has not drunken the blessed dew from off their bloom. 

 The seeing eye of child or lover, the poet's verse, the 

 musician's melody, add thus continually to the rich- 

 ness of the universe. Jefferies early possessed such an 

 eye, such an imagination, though not for many years 

 could he reveal some of its images by means of words. 

 In fact, he was very soon to bear witness to the pitiful 

 truth that the imagination does not supply the words 

 that shall be its expression ; he was to fill much paper with 

 words that revealed almost nothing of his inner and little 

 more of his outer life. 



