2i6 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



spend his evening.' He sees no way out ; no way of 

 blunting the contrast between the golden sun and wheat 

 and the harvest slave. He has come to see that the 

 labourer's life is not, as the Times said in 1872, ' that life 

 of competency without care which poets dream of '; he 

 has even found that harvest wages may be earned too 

 hard. He sees no way out. He states an evil, and dimly 

 sees a good. He has discovered something divine in 

 Nature with which he cannot reconcile men as they are. 

 But he takes refuge in no fortress of dreams ; he never 

 forgets, he would never desert, men and the present. * The 

 forest is gone,' he writes at Eltham, ' but the spirit of 

 Nature stays, and can be found by those who search for 

 it. Dearly as I love the open air, I cannot regret the 

 medieval days. I do not wish them back again ; I would 

 sooner fight in the foremost ranks of Time. Nor do we 

 need them, for the spirit of Nature stays, and will always 

 be here, no matter to how high a pinnacle of thought the 

 human mind may attain ; still the sweet air, and the hills, 

 and the sea, and the sun, will always be with us.'* 



But these essays are not to be judged by the thoughts 

 which occur in them. In the best he has created poetry 

 that gushes naturally, thought, emotion, and sensuous 

 picture, out of the loving contemplation of visible 

 things. 



There are at least four ways of looking at visible things. 

 Take, for example, a rough, thistly meadow at night. 



One man sees a multitude of tall, pale thistles in a field 

 of grey moonlight, knows them to be thistles, acknow- 

 ledges the fact, and passes on without pause. 



One is startled by their appearance. They are unlike 

 thistles or any other plants as seen by day, and he has 

 never seen them so before. He stops to make sure 

 what they are, and at last remembers seeing them in a 

 commonplace light by day, and he allows the first im- 

 pression to die away. 



Another sees them, and is startled, utterly forgetful 



* The Open Air. 



