' THE DEWY MORN ' 253 



Martial, he escaped, and after a frantic interview with 

 FeHsc, Barnard, and Goring, shot himself. 



With Godwin, the beautiful Felise, the half-emerging 

 Barnard, and the shadowy Goring ; with Felise's pretty 

 hapless maid, Polly Shaw, and Polly's lover and his old 

 father, and the phlegmatic miller ; with Cornleigh, and 

 his wife, the ' capital thing for Cornleigh,' the book might 

 have been the first in a long line of novels, giving a spiritual 

 and dramatic presentment of human life, and a perfectly 

 intimate, always relevant, background of landscape and 

 garden — nay, more than a background, since Nature is 

 stamped with the human characters as the hyacinth with 

 the signature of Apollo's grief. ' The Dewy Morn ' shows 

 more sides of the mature or maturing Jefferies than any 

 of its predecessors — his passion for beauty and humanity, 

 his sensuous and spiritual view of Nature and women, his 

 hatred of oppression, his impatience of delaying reform, his 

 belief in Fate, his growing curiosity about human character. 

 The writing, employed on description, portraiture, narra- 

 tive, reflection, and dialogue, is accordingly more varied, 

 nor is success denied to it. There are several places 

 where the easy omission of a phrase or two would have 

 cleared away an awkward fault, and the narrative pro- 

 gresses with a few small crudities to which the lack of 

 self-criticism blinded him. It is deftness only that is 

 wanting, and Jefferies was never deft. 



