94 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



the glittering water, filled him with a sense of higher life. 

 If he could only drink of this beauty always, he should be 

 immortal. . . .' 



Some of the writing, too, has an emotional exuberance, 

 even when it falls into fatuity, which may have been an 

 exalting exercise. There is, for example, a rich com- 

 parison of a kind of beautiful woman to one of those rare 

 years when the sky is blue not only in May, but until 

 October ends. When the hero has come to the disgust 

 of a voluptuous life, Jefferies opens a chapter of pause by 

 reflecting that ' the glorious, beautiful, and kingly Tyrian 

 purple had a peculiar odour about it — a faint sickly smell, 

 a dampness, a trace of the salt sea on whose shores the 

 dye was made. . . .' He continues :* 



' Deep, deep down under the apparent man — covered 

 over, it may be, with the ashes of many years, the scoriae 

 of passion and the lava of ambition, and these, too, spread 

 over with their crust of civilization, cultivated into 

 smiling gardens, and rich cornfields, and happy glorious 

 vineyards— under it all there is a buried city, a city of 

 the inner heart, lost and forgotten these many days. 

 There, on the walls of the chambers of that city, are pic- 

 tures, fresh as when they were painted by the alchemy of 

 light in the long, long years gone by. Dancing figures, 

 full of youth and joy, with gladness in every limb, with 

 flowing locks, and glances wildly free. There are green 

 trees, and the cool shade, and the proud peacock in his 

 glory of colour pluming himself upon the lawn. There 

 is the summer arbour, overgrown and hidden with ivy, 

 in whose dreamy, dark recess those lips first met, and 

 sent a thrill of love and hope through all the trembling 

 frame. There, too, in those chambers underneath the 

 fallen cornice, are hidden the thirty pieces of silver, the 

 cursed coin for whose possession the city was betrayed, 

 and the heart yielded into the hands of the world. There, 

 also, hidden in still darker corners, mouldering in decay, 

 but visible even yet, are the bones of the skeletons of 



*" The Scarlet Shawl. 



