178 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



hardly have reached the state of words. Here and there, 

 as in the novels and at the end of ' The Poacher,' are 

 passages which may be attributed to this spiritual side of 

 his life. But the mood, the very vocabulary, of these 

 early country books was against the revelation of which 

 he was in search ; the matter of those books could be the 

 subject of everyday talk, while it is likely that he said not 

 a word of his inner life until he wrote ' The Story of My 

 Heart.' The form of fiction, however, in ' Wood Magic ' 

 and in ' Bevis ' put Jefferies more at his ease, and he 

 could say of Bevis what he could not yet say of himself. 

 But now, at the age of thirty-four, with five more years to 

 die in — disease already strong upon his body, yet power- 

 less to deny him the pleasure of the north wind on the 

 hills — he was not shy of speaking out in his own person, 

 of going back to the fields 'of his youth to glean where 

 he had already reaped and harvested — fairy gleanings 

 gathered so late by the ghost of the reaper. 



By this time he was a man of much irregular reading in 

 poetry, science, and philosophy. If we may judge from 

 his liking for Dryden, Longfellow, and translations from 

 the ' Odyssey ' and ' Faust,' he had no very strong taste 

 for the form of poetry, though I have heard that he read, 

 more widely than was then common, the Elizabethan 

 song-writers. The old ballads he certainly loved. He 

 praised Addison almost alone among older prose-writers ; 

 among contemporaries, he admired Stevenson, Bret Harte, 

 and Charles Reade, but not Dickens. Of books belonging 

 to him I have seen ' The Assemblies of Al Hariri ' (trans- 

 lated by Chenery), ' Bhagavad Gita ' (translated by J. 

 Cockburn Thomson), Swinburne's * Poems and Ballads ' 

 (1871) ; translations of the ' Iliad,' the Greek Minor 

 Poets and the Anthology, and Persius ; and Percy's 

 ' Reliques.' These were the remains of a collection which 

 began to dwindle long before his death. He read less and 

 less as time went on. ' The glamour of modern science 

 and discoveries,' he tells us, ' faded away.' But, in any 

 case, he was perhaps always an erratic reader who knew 



