172 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



skeleton. He had little money but what was given to 

 him. Confined indoors, he had nothing to write. He 

 could not express ideas which did not come to him boldly. 

 But the winter of 1886-87 passed more easily. In January 

 he dictated a little. In February, 1887, he was looking 

 forward to the warm days by the sea. Then, before the 

 end of March, he had a haemorrhage, and for a time could 

 not even dictate. On August 14, 1887, he died of ex- 

 haustion and chronic fibroid phthisis, a modified form, 

 in which the tissue resists the bacilli by a fibrous harden- 

 ing of the lungs. ' He was,' said one doctor, ' a very 

 marked case of hysteria in man ' ; another, who knew his 

 WTitings, says that his portrait ' indicates the scrofulous 

 diathesis, with its singularly impressionable temperament, 

 its rapturous enjoyment of a delight, and its intense 

 susceptibility to a pang.' In some way, not yet to be 

 explained, the mortal pining of his body was related to 

 the intense mental vivacity of his last years. ' Some of my 

 best work,' he writes, 'was done in this intense agony.'* 

 His sense of colour became more acute. He tells us that in 

 the long, hot summer days of 1884 he took his folding- 

 stool out to a cabbage-field near Eltham to see the poppies, 

 because ' every spot of colour is a sort of food.' He never 

 really ceased work, and it was after the beginning of his 

 chain of diseases in 1881 that he took the walks by which 

 he knew, as he says in one letter, the whole of the Sussex 

 Downs. Many of his essays in ' Field and Hedgerow ' 

 were written or dictated to his wife during the worst of 

 his illness. ' Amaryllis at the Fair ' was also written then. 

 He made many plans — in May, 1885, for example (when 

 writing a short note ' made his pulse beat as if he had been 

 using^a sledgehammer 'f), offering a novel of which nothing 

 is known, called ' A Bit of Human Nature ' ; in May, 1886 

 (when ' anyone walking across the room heavily hurt him, 

 the jar shaking the injured intestine '), considering the 

 proposal that he should write a year-book or diary of 

 Nature. In his last year he undertook to write an intro- 



* To Mr. C. p. Scott. f Ibid. 



