194 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



mass of inherited structures. ... He is made up of the 

 Past. This is a happy and an inspiriting discovery . . . 

 which calls upon us for new and larger moral and physical 

 exertion, which throws upon us wider and nobler duties, 

 for upon us depends the future. 



' A whole circle of ideas of moral conceptions . . . 

 which were high and noble in the rudimentary being, . . . 

 Let these perish. . . . We must no longer allow the hoary 

 age of such traditions to bhnd the eye and cause the knee 

 to bend. . . . The very plants are wiser far. They seek 

 the light of to-day, the heat of the sun which shines at 

 this hour. . , . But ... it is necessary that some far- 

 seeing master-mind, some giant intellect, should arise, 

 and sketch out in bold, unmistakable outlines the grand 

 and noble future which the human race should labour 

 for. ... 



' The faiths of the past, of the ancient world, now 

 extinct or feebly lingering on, were each inspired by one 

 mind only. The faith of the future, in strong contrast, 

 will spring from the researches of a thousand thousand 

 thinkers, where minds, once brought into a focus, will 

 speedily burn up all that is useless and worn out with a 

 fierce heat, and evoke a new and brilliant light. This 

 converging thought is one of the greatest blessings of 

 the day, made possible by the vastly extended means of 

 communication, and almost seems specially destined for 

 this very purpose.'* 



The mood in which this was written must have been 

 a happier one, and it is justifiable to suppose that its 

 exalted and democratic optimism was due in no slight 

 degree to the clear vision that saw in all forms of life one 

 commonwealth, one law, one beauty. 



These thoughts are at one with many which follow in 

 the later chapters of ' The Story of My Heart.' The 

 divine beauty of the flesh which he enjoyed in pictures 

 and statuary is curiously inwoven with the beauty of 

 Nature. A shoulder, a bust, gratifies the ' sea- thirst ' 



* ' Nature and Eternity ' {Longman''s Mas;azine, May, 1895). 



