'THE DEWY MORN' 237 



There are at least three other passages between FeHse 

 and Barnard which would be enough to place this fiction 

 very high in spite of some awkwardness, as in the steps to 

 marriage after the crisis of the book. 



The second passage is where Barnard, admiring but 

 not yet loving Felise, hides in the bracken by the bathing- 

 pool, and, watching Felise, is constrained to remain hidden 

 while she unexpectedly bathes before his eyes. In 

 ' Nature in the Louvre ' and in ' The Story of My Heart ' 

 Jefferies has written of the nude \\dth something beyond 

 and above idolatry. The hip, the breast, the flank, the 

 back, the limbs, are dear to eye and heart ; they are loved 

 for their humanity ; and he gives them a universal sig- 

 nificance, and Unks them to the sunlight and the hills and 

 the sea. He found ' the idea of perfect human beauty — 

 the idea of shape and curve and motion ' in the writers 

 of Greece, ' even those of pure thought.' His attitude 

 towards this beauty is Greek, and it is more than Greek, 

 something more than Greek which I can only suggest by 

 saying that there is a feminine element in it which the 

 Greek never had. It is sensuous, without the bold flesh- 

 liness of Shakespeare's ' Venus and Adonis,' without the 

 headiness of Keats' ' Eve of St. Agnes,' without Pater's 

 languor. The whole passage should be compared with 

 that describing the similar scene of Damon and Musidora 

 in Thomson's * Summer,' to which the stamp of a 

 more worldly nature has given a different charm. 

 Of shame there is not a touch, in Jefferies or in his 

 reader. 



' Felise opened the door of the bathing-room, and 

 stepped out upon the platform before it. She stood in 

 the shadow of the beeches behind ; all the rest of the 

 pool was in bright hght. Her bathing-tunic was blue, 

 bordered with white, and fringed with gold — such a tunic 

 as might have been worn by a Grecian maiden. 



' It was loose about her shoulders : they were nearly 

 bare ; her arms quite so. In the shade the whiteness 

 and purity of her skin was wonderfully beautiful. It 



