LAST ESSAYS 291 



such are, among others, ' Hours of Spring,' ' Winds of 

 Heaven,' ' My Old Village,' and ' Nature and Eternity.' 

 The best of these two classes are examples of Jefferies' 

 ripest art and most advanced ideas, even though he could 

 often see the clouds only through a window, and could 

 escape from pain, from ' the iron grip of hell,' only for 

 moments while he was writing them. In several it is 

 clear that he is thinking about death as something that 

 is for him. In the passage on phthisis, which he had been 

 studying, in ' Some April Insects '; in the sadness of the 

 hour when he saw the emperor moth on that sunny 

 second day of April — ' to think it will never return '; in 

 the looking back (in ' Walks in the Wheatfields ' and ' My 

 Old Village ') to Coate, to the cornfields under the Downs, 

 and to the brook ; in the vividness of his Crowborough 

 winter picture — in these things there is death. 



His own poverty and pain contributed, perhaps, a little 

 to the bitterness of his writing on poverty at this time. 

 He would revive the tithe — ' the monstrous injustice of 

 the extraordinary tithe ' — if only the poor and aged and 

 injured of the village might have it. He seemed to see 

 the workhouse as the labourer does in the wintry moon 

 when first the rheumatism forbids him to rise — ' that 

 blot on our civilization — the workhouse '; and to give 

 the children a midday meal at the school, he said, ' would 

 be only simple justice after so many centuries.' ' What 

 a triumph for the Jubilee Year,'* he wrote (or, I should 

 say, dictated) in 1887, his death-year, at sight of the old 

 notice-board saying : 



' All persons found wandering abroad, lying, lodging, 

 or being in any barn, outhouse, or in the open air, and 

 not giving a good account of themselves, will be appre- 

 hended as rogues and vagabonds, and be either publicly 

 whipt or sent to the house of correction, and afterwards 

 disposed of according to law, by order of the magistrates. 

 Any person who shall apprehend any rogue or vagabond 

 will be entitled to a reward of ten shillings.' 



* ' Country Places,' Field and Hedgerow. 



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