LAST ESSAYS 303 



writing of one in whose veins the sea floweth, who is 

 clothed with the heavens, crowned with the stars, as 

 Traherne says — one who so loves and enjoys the world 

 that he is ' covetous and earnest to persuade others to 

 enjoy it.' Thinking of all these things, Jefferies remem- 

 bers his error to believe that because he loved the earth, 

 the earth loved him. He recalls how he once walked 

 * gaily ' up to Beachy Head, joying in sun and wind, and 

 crunching the shells of long-dead things for which Nature 

 cares as much as for him. That sends him to the thought 

 of ' The Story of My Heart ': ' We must look to ourselves 

 to help ourselves. We must think ourselves into an 

 earthly immortality ';* for so he calls a divine fulness 

 of life. And the little pebble in the grass teaches him 

 that he is a soul, ' because he is not that that touches 

 the nerves of his hand '; the chief use of matter is ' to 

 demonstrate to us the existence of the soul.' He returns 

 to the beauty of the earth, of the forest-clad hills about 

 Crowborough, even in winter, when the sky was ' black 

 and faintly yellow — brutal colours of despotism — 

 heaven striking with clenched fist.' Earth is always 

 beautiful, and ' the heart, from the moment of its first 

 beat, instinctively longs for the beautiful.' But it is 

 frost-bound, and a labouring man who would not go to 

 the workhouse asks to be allowed to dig in the garden : 



' Nature, earth, and the gods did not help him ; sun 

 and stars, where were they ? He knocked at the door 

 of the farms and found good in man only — not in Law 

 or Order, but in individual man alone. 'f 



The snow and wind will not spare the gypsy woman 

 lying with her babes. ' Nothing good to man but man. 

 Let man, then, leave his gods and lift up his ideal beyond 

 them.' The birds also starve — only one thrush is left. 

 And yet ' the buzzing crowds of summer were still under 

 the snow.' Then the long frost breaks ; the wind is in 

 the south, and the gorse in flower. But an old man goes 

 past in a waggon on the bed in which he had slept seventy- 



* ^\io\irs oi St^uw^^' Field and Hedgerow. t !btd. 



