RECAPITULATION 321 



When these books had been written his good health 

 was at an end, and when, in ' Nature near London,' he 

 came to describe scenes which he had not known as a 

 young man, there was a new subtlety in the observation, 

 at once a more microscopic and a more sensuous eye, 

 more tenderness, a greater love of making pictures and 

 of dwelling upon colours and forms. There was no more 

 of the rude rustic content to be out rabbiting and fishing. 

 The tall countryman who knew and loved all weathers 

 as they came was bending, and spring was now intensely 

 spring to his reawakened senses. The seasons, night and 

 day, heat and cold, sun and rain and snow, became more 

 sharply differentiated in his mind, and came to him with 

 many fresh cries of joyous or pathetic appeal. In the 

 early books the country lies before us very much as it 

 would have appeared to James Luckett or old John 

 Jefferies. They would have recognized everything in 

 them, if they had had the luck to read them ; the sport, 

 the poaching, the curious notes on wild things, the old 

 customs and pieces of gossip — these stand out clear and 

 unquestionable as in an old woodcut. It was a priceless 

 gift, smelling of youth and the days before the steam- 

 plough. But how different these later essays ! Pain, 

 anxiety, fatigue, had put a sharp edge on life — a keen 

 edge, easily worn out. He was still glad to be with a 

 shepherd, to hear about the sport, but it was character- 

 istic of the new period that he should watch a trout for 

 days and years, and be careful lest anyone should rob 

 the pool of it ; that he should love the old wooden plough 

 with no machine-made lines, and discover the ' bloom ' 

 in the summer atmosphere ; and confess that he often 

 went to London with no object, and, arriving there, wan- 

 dered wherever the throng might carry him. In these 

 later essays there is often much observation that may be 

 read for its own sake. But something was creeping into 

 the style, staining it with more delicate dyes. The bloom 

 in the atmosphere, the hues on an old barn-roof, were in 

 part his own life-blood. In the earlier work we think 



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