LATER ESSAYS 217 



that there was anything there when he passed before. 

 He cannot reason about them, is too lazy or excited to 

 go over and touch and see ; he returns home with a tale 

 of the unusual moonlight growth in the field at the edge 

 of the wood. In an earlier age he might have reported 

 the seeing of a mushroom flourishing of fairies. 



Another sees them with a rapt placidity as something 

 beautiful and new, and his recollection or discovery that 

 they are thistles does not disturb his enjoyment. His 

 eye and heart feed together upon their strangeness and 

 beauty. He has really captured one of the visions which 

 clear eyes and an untarnished soul are summoning con- 

 tinually from inexhaustible and eternal Nature. 



Jefferies is often hke the first, and the result of this 

 kind of vision is his most pedestrian essay ; at his best, 

 as in ' The Pageant of Summer,' he is like the last. Being 

 a prose-writer, he cannot change the things themselves — 

 flower, and leaf, and sky — into melody and words, as the 

 poet can in verse. Prose is by its nature discursive and 

 explanatory, and Jefferies brings the objects before the 

 eyes, and gradually, by means of a phrase, a comment, or 

 a thought arising out of them, invests them with the 

 spirit of life which gave them their first significance to 

 him. Description and meditation, a beating heart and 

 memory aiding, grow and intertwine with all the appar- 

 ently ungoverned life of copse or meadow that comes to 

 have a separate identity of its own. He seeks no neat- 

 ness or balance, is impatient of the devices of the 

 city-bred artist. ' Is all the world,' he asks, ' to be 

 Versaillised ?' It is impossible without an example 

 to describe the process by which he passes out of the 

 delight of the eyes into the spiritual world, as in this 

 passage from ' The Pageant of Summer ': 



' Fanning so swiftly, the wasp's wings are but just 

 visible as he passes ; did he pause, the light would be 

 apparent through their texture. On the wings of the 

 dragon-fly, as he hovers an instant before he darts, there 

 is a prismatic gleam. These wing textures are even more 



