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best of men to speak the truth. Its shape is the shape 

 of an emotional mood, and it ends because the emotion 

 ends. It is music, and above, or independent of, logic. 

 It obeys some deeper law than that which any model 

 could teach. It really has the effect of music, with its 

 succession of thoughts and images wrought into as real a 

 unity as there is in ' Phaselus tile ' or the ' Ode to a 

 Nightingale.' Some would say the effect is that of 

 religious music, but it rebels against all the gods, against 

 all things except life. 



In ' The July Grass ' another of his old thoughts has 

 returned. At the sight of a scarlet-spotted fly enjoying 

 the sun — ' if the sunshine were a hundred hours long, still 

 it would not be long enough ' — he resolves that he will 

 not think ; he will be unconscious, he will live. He has 

 there met, perhaps, the most tragic condition of man's 

 greatness — his self-consciousness. If the sea-waves were 

 to be self-conscious, they would cease to wash the shore ; 

 a self-conscious world would fester and stink in a month. 

 Many men survive the terror. Jefferies survived it, and 

 desired to be like the scarlet-spotted fly. Has the Nature 

 of which he spoke ambiguous, terrible things in ' The 

 Story of My Heart ' taken a sharp revenge ? or is she 

 only showing the maternal extremity of her love, that 

 she makes him say, ' All things that are beautiful are 

 found by chance, like everything that is good '? It is 

 the same cry as the poet's ' Let us keep our lives simple 

 and passionate.' In one place, having defended the in- 

 telligence of ants, hinting at ' some consideration of 

 which we are ignorant, but which weighs with ants,' he 

 says : * I do not know that I am myself more rational.'* 

 But he is not content to gaze at the scarlet and gold and 

 crimson and green of July, to see, to drink it, but desires 

 * in some way to make it part of me, that I might live it.' 

 Oh, the unprofitable sweetness of life, sweetest when it 

 passes briefly and unconsciously like a poppy's blossom- 

 ing ! Jefferies will not be content until he has seen it all. 



* 'Among the Nuts,' Field and Hedgerow. 



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