ii6 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



the midnight stars, and conspires with the winds and the 

 setting sun to colour and mould the clouds. It is an 

 epitome of the world, of ' other people,' and plunging 

 into it the mind ranges through the humiliations or 

 oblivions of insignificance to all the consolations and 

 even triumphs of preserving its own integrity there, and 

 perhaps even — for some moments — the bliss of gliding 

 as a wave in the world-mind that towers and roars and 

 foams here with beauty and shipwreck and curious 

 flotsam on the tide. In little towns and villages there 

 is often no real incongruity with the fields in which they 

 lie, with their handful of lights at night. In large towns 

 there is a real interruption. The spirits of grass and 

 tree and pool have been driven underground ; ponderous 

 headstones of factory and warehouse keep them twisted 

 and helpless in their graves. But London, except in 

 paltry ways to lungs and feet, ends by overcoming any 

 such fanciful sense of its incongruity with Nature. And 

 that, too, not because of the excellent skies over it, the 

 river, the wind in the smoke, the rain on the face ; nor 

 because of the fine grass that will grow through the grilles 

 in the pavement round the trees by the National Portrait 

 Gallery and the Gaiety Theatre, or the dock and ground- 

 sel and grass and rose-bay that greedily adorn — as with 

 the hand that befiowered Nero's grave — the crude earth 

 and bricks of demolished buildings ; but simply on account 

 of its ancientness, its bulk, its humanity, and, arising out 

 of these, its inevitableness as part of what the sun shines 

 on. Of Aymer Malet in his novel of ' World's End ' 

 Jefferies wrote : ' Like all men with any pretence to 

 brains, though he delighted in Nature and loved the 

 country, there was a strong, almost irresistible desire 

 within him to mingle in the vast crowds of cities, to feel 

 that indefinable " life " which animates the mass.' He 

 said himself : ' I am very fond of what I may call a thick- 

 ness of the people such as exists in London '; ' I dream in 

 London quite as much as in the woodlands '; * I like the 

 solitude of the hills and the hum of the most crowded 



