LAST ESSAYS 299 



pungent smoke blown round about by the occasional 

 puffs of wind, the shadowy trees, the sound of the horses 

 cropping the grass, the night that steals on till the stubbles 

 alone are light among the fields — the gipsy sleeps in his 

 tent on mother earth ; it is, you see, primeval man with 

 primeval Nature. One thing he gains, at least — an iron 

 health, an untiring foot, women whose haunches bear 

 any burden, children whose naked feet are not afraid of 

 the dew.'* 



Few townsmen could accept, as Jefferies did, the 

 Downs and the crowd by the Mansion House and the 

 docks, not merely as theoretically all of one spirit, but 

 in his heart. For him, the steam-plough and the reaping- 

 machine, as well as oak and violet ; he wants the light 

 railway to call at the farmyard gate. And yet he has 

 always a sense of the contrast between what belongs to 

 an outdoor and what belongs to an indoor tradition, 

 rejecting the indoor very heartily as when he rejects the 

 great book on colours, because it deals with the artificial 

 and not with Nature. He asks if it would be possible 

 ' to build up a fresh system of colour language by means 

 of natural objects.' And, again, ' I found,' he says, 

 * from the dandelion that there were no books. 'f Unless 

 the writers have gone to Nature, their books are biblia 

 ahihlia. He likes White, because ' he was not full of 

 evolution when he walked out, or variation, or devolu- 

 tion, or degeneration. He did not look for microbes 

 everywhere. His mind was free and his eye open. 'J 

 He has gone through many books to get news of the 

 dandelion, but he sits on the thrown timber and wants 

 the soul of the flowers. Science he respects ; he wants 

 alchemy, too. 



■ * Let us not be too entirely mechanical, Baconian, and 

 experimental only ; let us let the soul hope and dream 

 and float on these oceans of accumulated facts, and feel 



* ' Just before Winter,' Field and Hedgerow. 



■j- ' Nature and Books,' if>id. 



X Preface to Natural History of Selborne. 



