' THE STORY OF MY HEART ' 203 



study should he made of chance ; it seems to me that an 

 organon might be deduced from chance as much as from 

 experiment.' Like that same thinker, it is for a ' first 

 valley of leisure '* that he craves, where labour will 

 become ' less incessant, exhausting, less material, tyran- 

 nical, pitiless.' He repeats his belief that we can reach 

 ideas far outside the circle of to-day. Let all ' do their 

 utmost to think outside and beyond our present circle 

 of ideas.' ' What,' he asks, ' would be said if a carpenter 

 about to commence a piece of work examined his tools 

 and deliberately cast away that with the finest edge ?' 

 That tool is the soul, the mind of the mind, and it must 

 be our purpose to educate the soul ; and he is thinking 

 of that ' lofty morality ' which, says M. Maeterlinck, 

 ' presupposes a state of soul or of heart rather than a 

 code of strictly formulated precepts ... its essence 

 the sincere and strong wish to form within ourselves a 

 powerful idea of justice and of love that always rises 

 above that formed by the clearest and most generous 

 portions of our intelHgence.'t Just before the noble 

 conclusion of the book (' That I may have the fullest 

 soul-life '), Jefferies expresses his dissatisfaction with the 

 words he has used : ' I must leave my book as a whole,' 

 he says, ' to give its own meaning to its words '; and 

 then ' after so much pondering, I feel that I know nothing, 

 that I have not yet begun.' 



The book is a poem ; I had almost said a piece of music. 

 The ideas rise up and fall, lose their outlines, and, resur- 

 gent again, have not fulfilled their whole purpose until 

 the full-charged silence of the conclusion. Prose has 

 rarely reached such a length — I recall chiefly ' Religio 

 Medici ' and the ' Cypress Grove ' of Drummond — and 

 yet retained this absolute, more than logical, unity, such 

 a complex consistency of moods that now shake the cliffs 

 and now cannot loosen the dew from the flower of the 

 grass. The reason, often beckoned to, can remain in 

 abeyance throughout much of the early enjoyment of 



* The Buried Temple. •}• Life and Flowers. 



