CHAPTER X 



'NATURE NEAR LONDON' 



When he had written ' The Gamekeeper ' and its three 

 companion books, Jefferies had all but exhausted his 

 notes of Coate Farm and the surrounding country ; he 

 had made a mental retrogression in order to use them 

 more vividly. When he writes about that county again 

 it is nearly always as one who, having travelled to a 

 distant city of the mind, can never return. His memories 

 of Wiltshire are inexhaustible ; but ' Wood Magic ' and 

 ' Bevis ' are not memories as were the earlier books. 

 The Surbiton country definitely appeared in ' Wild Life,' 

 and no doubt his observations there helped him in the 

 other books of that time ; but it was when he had emptied 

 his Wiltshire notebooks that he began to use chiefly 

 those of Surbiton. Parts of ' Nature near London ' were 

 written in 1881 ; so, too, was ' The Coming of Summer,' 

 and perhaps ' The Spring of the Year ' ; the material is 

 clearly taken from 1877 ^^^ the following years. And 

 not only is the material new, but the eye that sees and 

 the mind that broods over it is changed. The old, simpler 

 exuberance of ' The Poacher ' is lost. Thoughts have 

 troubled and checked it ; his health is finally to give 

 way in 1881 ; and the new surroundings are not a part 

 of him, as were the old, and he seems to see them more as 

 strange pictures — as pictures which his brooding and 

 solitary mind more and more informs ; the labourers 

 and farmers and keepers who used to move about the 

 Wiltshire fields have disappeared, and the landscape is 



150 



