i8o THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



The general idea of direction is southerly, both spring and 

 autumn ; no doubt the reason is because this is a northern 

 country.'* 



But five fine senses are not the sum even of a sensual 

 man, and in Jefferies they are humble in the service of the 

 soul that apprehends the beauty of life and the bitterness 

 because that must fade or die by the hand of Fate or Time 

 or Man himself. His love and enjoyment of beauty, far 

 more than his ill-health and pain, were the causes of his 

 sorrowfulness. Of melancholy he has little ; for, alike in 

 sorrow and in joy, he is keenly alive, and in both revolting 

 against the alterable conditions of life, and penetrating 

 them to see the beauty at the heart. Yet by this time his 

 ill-health was assured. I have heard that in his sleeplessness 

 he was known to ring all the bells of the house in which he 

 lay, unable to bear the isolation among those who slept. 

 Four years before the end he looked ' near death.' 



He was now in the main a poet, in whose composition 

 there is a naturalist, a sportsman, a curious minded and 

 solitary countryman, as well as a lover and interpreter of 

 life. He could still be only one of these things at a time, as 

 in * Red Deer,' where he was a mere sportsman. When he 

 refused even to consider the possibility that there could 

 be anything better than fine white flour or a feather-bed ; 

 when he laughed at hygiene, or philanthropy, or temper- 

 ance, or other ' fads,' he was a countryman preserving his 

 cottage ideas. But more and more these portions of him 

 took a due and unobserved place in the poet, the larger 

 man who, though exquisitely sensitive, had no mere 

 delicacy and rejected no part of life in man or nature, 

 country or town. His taste was for quiet and seclusion 

 and the things that are old — ' give me the old road, the 

 same flowers ' — but that could never long restrain him 

 from the long ranging thoughts which soon put away 

 these things from him for ever. The old world of ' fear 

 God, honour the pheasant, and damn the rest ' became 

 dim to him. Something he may have lost, but the 



* 'January in the Sussex Woods ' in Life of the Fields. 



