154 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



days they have among the ripening corn !' Actually, a 

 farmer's son who thinks of the happiness of sparrows in the 

 corn ! ' Nutty Autumn ' has some learned and delightful 

 colour notes. Artists may treasure them ; they may 

 teach others how to see ; but notes they remain, in spite 

 of the conclusion : 



* The autumn itself is nutty, brown, hard, frosty, and 

 sweet. Nuts are hard, frosts are hard ; but the one is 

 sweet, and the other braces the strong. Exercise often 

 wearies in the spring, and in the summer heats is scarcely 

 /^ to be faced ; but in autumn, to those who are well, every 

 step is bracing and hardens the frame, as the sap is 

 hardening in the trees.'* 



It was written in the autumn of 1881, and hints that he 

 was not one of those who are well. To this class of notes 

 belong the opening and other parts of ' The River,' the 

 end of ' The Crows,' and the description of the London 

 atmosphere floating out to the country before a north-east 

 wind. He writes, in ' The River ': 



' There is a slight but perceptible colour in the atmo- 

 sphere of summer. It is not visible close at hand, nor 

 always where the light falls strongest, and if looked at 

 too long it sometimes fades away. But over gorse and 

 heath, in the warm hollows of wheatfields, and round 

 about the rising ground, there is something more than air 

 alone. It is not mist, nor the hazy vapour of autumn, 

 nor the blue tints that come over distant hills and 

 woods. 



' As there is bloom upon the peach and grape, so this 

 is the bloom of summer. The air is ripe and rich, full 

 of the emanations, the perfume, from corn and flower 

 and leafy tree. In strictness the term will not, of course, 

 be accurate, yet by what other word can this appearance 

 in the atmosphere be described but as a bloom ? Upon 

 a still and sunlit summer afternoon it may be seen over 

 the osier-covered islets in the Thames immediately above 

 Teddington Lock.'f 



* ' Nutty Autumn,' Natm-e near London. t ' The River,' ibid. 



