LAST ESSAYS 307 



makes them more than extracts from Nature, is the 

 quickening imagination. He has built images of certain 

 things in his brain with such clearness and of such close 

 relationship to his own life and thought that they make 

 a new world, where, without imagination, we should have 

 missed a thousand things that Nature has. ' At every 

 hour of the day,' he says,* ' I am accustomed to call up 

 figures at will before my eyes, which stand out well 

 defined and coloured to the very hue of their faces.* 

 Without this imagination there is no life. Imagination 

 is not an artistic quality, but a quality pertaining to 

 intensity of life, to reality, and it is possessed by the 

 ploughman, sailor, or mechanic as commonly as by the 

 artist, and by it they live, or, more accurately, by their 

 possession they prove that they live, and do not endure 

 the life in death of the unimaginative. The intellect and 

 the perpetually decaying frame speak aloud in tones 

 which mean that death comes soon and death ends all ; 

 that when the breath is out of our bodies all is over, and 

 the visible world of men and women and Nature and art 

 is no more to us than, in a few days, we are to them. But 

 imagination stops our ears against the song of the cold 

 sirens on the rocks, and helps us to go on living as if for 

 ever, to do and to be the greatest and most god-like 

 things, making nothing of time or death. Thus, the con- 

 trast is not between imagination and reality, but between 

 imagination and death ; it is better to say between love 

 and death, for imagination is the most sacred child of love. 

 Jefferies himself says of beauty which only the imagina- 

 tion can hold that it is ' an expression of hope ; . . . while 

 the heart is absorbed in its contemplation, unconscious 

 but powerful hope is filling the breast. 'f 



' My Old Village, 'J one of the last, if not the last, of his 

 essays, is perhaps the finest of all in its naturalism, its 

 pathos, its beauty, its perfection of form, as of a copse or 

 a worn tree which we recognize as perfect because it has 



* 'Field Sports in Art,' Field and Hedgerow. 

 t ' Nature in the Louvre,' ibid. % Ibid. 



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