120 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



of women's dresses fed his avaricious eye. The pictures 

 in the National Gallery, the statues in the Museum, were 

 as real to him as hills and stars. Staying in a recess of 

 London Bridge in the summer morning sun, he enjoyed 

 the coloured ships and shadowed wharves and clear air ; 

 or, leaning on the parapet, felt the sun, as when he rested 

 in the fosse of Liddington Castle on his own Wiltshire 

 Downs. ' Nature,' he said, ' was deepened by the crowds 

 and foot-worn stones.' It was Trafalgar Square that, 

 on a summer day, forced him to ask, as he ' dreamed 

 under the beautiful breast of heaven — heaven brooding 

 and descending in pure light upon man's handiwork : 

 If the light shall thus come in, and of its mere loveliness 

 overcome every aspect of dreariness, why shall not the 

 light of thought and hope — the light of the soul — over- 

 come and sweep away the dust of our lives ?' On 

 London Bridge and by the Royal Exchange he ' felt the 

 presence of the immense powers of the universe ' — felt 

 himself * in the midst of eternity, in the midst of the 

 supernatural, among the immortal.' So great was his 

 admiration that he called London Bridge ' the only veal 

 place in the world.' The cities, he continues, ' run 

 towards London, as young partridges run to their mother. 

 The cities know that they are not real. Tliey are only 

 houses and wharves and bricks and stucco — only out- 

 side. The minds of all men in them — merchants, artists, 

 thinkers — are bent on London. ... A house is not a 

 dwelling if a man's heart be elsewhere. Now, the heart 

 of the world is in London, and the cities with the simula- 

 crum of man in them are empty. They are moving images 

 only ; stand here, and you are real.' It is not the least 

 of the city's praises that it was part of the culture which 

 made Richard Jefferies' mature work memorable. 



Of his life at this period we have little evidence except 

 what is to be found in his books. As he wrote for many 

 newspapers and magazines, and changed his publisher 

 several times, he was pretty often in London, and must 

 have had his hours oi disgust ; but tluit ' the town was 



