CHAPTER XIII 

 'THE STORY OF MY HEART' 



On June 22, 1883, Jefferies wrote* to say that he had 

 just fmished writing a book about which he had been 

 meditating seventeen years ; he had called it ' The Story 

 of My Heart : An Autobiography.' He was then living 

 at West Brighton. The sea had once before strengthened 

 his original intention to write down his experiences ; he 

 tried or resolved to try again, but vainly. In 1880, once 

 more by the sea, at Pevensey, ' under happy circum- 

 stances,' he made a few notes which he kept. He was 

 then thirty-two or thirty-three — at the age when others, 

 such as Whitman, have received their illumination. Two 

 years later he began to ^\Tite the book which was now 

 finished. 



He had taken a long journey since first, when he 

 was eighteen, ' an inner and esoteric meaning ' began to 

 come to him ' from all the visible universe,' and ' inde- 

 finable aspirations filled him ' as a result of his intense 

 moments of oneness with Nature on the Downs. Those 

 and the even earlier experiences were brief momentary 

 ravishments of his daily hfe as student, sportsman, and 

 reporter. Had they been of long duration and frequent 

 occurrence, it seems likely that they would have had a 

 more immediate influence on his life and writing, and that 

 they would have become connected with his piety. As 

 he describes those moments in his maturity they are 

 elusive ; to the writer of the letters to the Times they can 



* To Mr. C. J. Longman. 



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