• THE STORY OF MY HEART ' 205 



a tragic and inspiring spectacle to watch this spirit at 

 odds with the universe and time embattled. 



The physician and the athlete have not done for the 

 body what Jefferies helps to do by proving it divine ; in 

 his book lies more incitement to a spiritual consideration 

 of the flesh than in any other. Athleticism and week-ends 

 in the country are not to be despised ; Jefferies would not 

 have despised them, though he thought little of short 

 races ; but they will fall away and recur before his ' I 

 believe in the body ' has even been fully understood. He 

 thinks of Nature as supplying men with strength and 

 desire and means for soul-life. He has rediscovered the 

 sources of joy in Nature, and foresees that what has fed his 

 lonely ecstasy in the Downs will distribute the same force 

 and balm among the cities of men below. They are, 

 indeed, perennial sources, but his passionate love of the 

 beautiful and joyous fill him with longing for the day when 

 they shall be universal too. In spite of that thought of 

 the inhumanity of Nature, I think that not Blake, not 

 ' Three years she grew in sun and shower,' so fills the mind 

 with the attainable harmony of the world in which man 

 has yet to learn his part. A few words of Blake are 

 quintessential, inexhaustibly fecund, but they are hiero- 

 glyphics, while the words of Jefferies are laced through 

 and through with sunlight and air, and they have the 

 power of wings. What other mystics have claimed seems 

 true of him — that he is a mouthpiece of Nature herself. 

 He has not, as others have done, sighed after an unsocial 

 virtue, but for one that touches all men ; his aim the 

 ultimate one of joy ; and therefore when he says, ' I 

 believe in the body,' it is more than hygiene, and passes 

 into the beating of our hearts and into the music of life 

 itself. 



He desires to study and sharpen and employ the soul, 

 ' the keenest, the sharpest tool possessed by man,' and 

 those labours, it may be surmised, would amply fill the 

 time of leisure for which he yearns. He does not, any 

 more than M. Maeterlinck, pretend to draw up a syllabus 



