FIRST NOVELS 97 



thought ' Restless Human Hearts ' the best thing he had 

 ever written, and was well pleased with what he called its 

 ' odd humour ' and ' original positions.' He begins to 

 reveal himself at once in it. ' The lives of some among 

 us,' he writes, ' do seem in some peculiar way to corre- 

 spond with the singularities of Nature . . . persons 

 whose whole being vibrates to the subtle and invisible 

 touch of Nature, are alive to-day.' Such words help to 

 prove that he was writing exactly when, in ' The Story of 

 My Heart,' he traced his thoughts back through his early 

 manhood to his youth. He speaks clearly for himself, 

 in the presence of a picture at Antwerp Cathedral, when 

 he points to the artist's ' sensual spiritualism : which is a 

 union of the beauty perceived by the chaste and some- 

 what sad mind, and of the beauty which fascinates the 

 eye.' The description applies to Jefferies himself, especi- 

 ally as he shows himself in ' The Dewy Morn.' 



His heroine, Heloise, is daughter of an old man who 

 ' could not be happy unless he heard the finches sing 

 when he woke ' — those greenfinches that sing all through 

 Jefferies' books. He lives near ' The Sun ' at ' Avon- 

 bourne,' by the Downs — ' downs upon whose slopes you 

 might lie and listen to the whistling of the breezes through 

 the bennets till all thought of the world and its conten- 

 tions passes out of the mind.' Heloise, the beautiful girl 

 at one with Nature, is a dim sketch for the Felise of ' The 

 Dewy Morn ' : 



' Heloise's heart was full of aspirings — after she knew 

 not what, but which she deemed were sacred hopes. 

 She sat under the old chestnut-trees, watching the 

 shadows dancing, and let these feelings have their way. 

 She climbed up the steep-sided downs, and choosing a 

 hollow sheltered from the wind, lay down upon the soft 

 thymy turf, while the bees flew overhead and the lark 

 sang high above her, and dreamt day-dreams, not of 

 heaven, but of something — she knew not what ; of a 

 state of existence all and every hour of which should be 

 light and joy and life. It was one of her fancies, thus 



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