234 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



perfume or a sound that fills a senseless hall for a short 

 time. That joy is rather the discovery of sympathies and 

 affinities, heaven high, ocean deep, and wide as the 

 world. Felise emerges dominant from the expanse of 

 living things because she is human, but to say that she 

 brings them their beauty is as if a mole were to announce 

 that upon his mounds were based the pillars that upheld 

 the firmament. No, she bears gifts of beauty about with 

 her to flower and clod and cloud only in the sense that 

 she illuminates them for herself and her lover, and that 

 through her all created things are gladdened because in 

 her the divine, which they also partake, riots unwontedly ; 

 through her they speak and have new life. Jefferies 

 speaks more accurately when he says that until Barnard 

 came the land was incomplete ; he gave a meaning to it ; 

 and ' she endowed him with all that she perceived in the 

 glory and mystery around her by day and night.' 

 Nature's reception of Felise makes these opening chapters 

 comparable, for their sensuous and holy delight, with few 

 things except the ' Epithalamion ' of Spenser and the love 

 scene between Esla and Cloten in the tenth book of ' The 

 Dawn in Britain.' 



But the spiritual blitheness is not found only where 

 Felise is wandering, like Jefferies, alone and a lover. It 

 is allied in its warmth to Titian's ' Venus and Adonis,' and 

 has also a real dramatic value, in this scene where Felise, 

 as yet all but a stranger to Barnard, has compelled him to 

 stop and speak to her when he is riding on the Downs. 

 They can talk but awkwardly ; she looks straight in his 

 face, but he avoids her ; she strokes his horse. 



' He could not help but look, at the sound of his name. 

 He saw a face full of wistful meaning upturned to him. 

 Her golden hair had strayed a little on her forehead, three 

 or four glistening threads wandered over it, asking some 

 loving hand to smooth them back. The white brow 

 without a stain, a mark, a fine ; no kiss there but must be 

 purified by the touch ; it was an altar which could not be 

 tainted — which would turn taint to purity. Large grey 



