LITERATURE OF FIELD AND HEDGEROW 9 
the full effect of the bright colours, without detecting the im- 
perfections of the leaves, and see their yellow, scarlet and crimson 
fires, of all tints, mingled and contrasted with the green. Some 
maples are yet green, only yellow or crimson tipped on the edges 
of their flakes, like the edges of a hazel-nut bur ; some are 
wholly brilliant scarlet, raying out regularly and finely every 
way, bilaterally, like the veins of a leaf ; others, of more irregular 
form, when I turn my head slightly, emptying out some of its 
earthiness and concealing the trunk of the tree, seem to rest 
heavily flake on flake, like yellow and scarlet clouds, wreath 
upon wreath, or like snowdrifts driving through the air, stratified 
by the wind. It adds greatly to the beauty of such a swamp at 
this season, that, even though there may be no other trees inter- 
spersed, it is not seen as a simple mass of colour, but, different 
trees being of different colours and hues, the outline of each 
crescent tree-top is distinct, and where one laps on to another. 
Yet a painter would hardly venture to make them thus distinct 
a quarter of a mile off.” 
The above is a mosaic composed of good fragments, but still 
fragments only, and to a certain extent repetitions of each other, 
and ungrammatically strung together ; while the frequent re- 
petitions which occur in much of Jefferies’ finest writing are 
like the refrain of a song. They are all part of a harmony. Read 
“ The Pageant of Summer ” (“ Life of the Fields,” Chatto and 
Windus). Where the Ode to Immortality ranks in poetry — there 
the Pageant ranks in prose. Such is the opinion of Besant. But 
let us return to White and his “ russet woodlands.” He notes 
the shapes and sizes of oaks, but never their colour. Compare 
Jefferies’ rough note on these trees in November. “ Oaks still in 
full leaf, some light brown, still trace of green, some brown, 
some buff and tawny almost, save in background, toned by 
shadow, a trace of red.” The oak tree does not usually strike 
one by its autumn foliage. Yet Jefferies notes four shades of 
brown, or six, if you include those modified by green, red, and 
shadow colour. Such notes as these are nOt merely of artistic 
value. They sometimes — perhaps always — are capable of a 
scientific bearing. For instance, Jefferies himself says, in one of 
his magazine articles : “ You may tell how much moisture there 
is in the air in a given place by the colours of the autumn leaves ; 
the horse chestnut, scarlet near a stream, is merely yellowish in 
drier soils.” (Scarlet and pink may denote a change of light 
into heat, which occurs where damp and cold threaten to chill 
vegetable tissues, as on the night-exposed sides of daisy and 
hawkweed petals.) But obviously the more free our observer is 
from any theory he wishes to prove, the more valuable his notes 
become. See the delightful preface Jefferies has written to 
the Natural History of Selborne. White, when he walked 
out, “ was not full of evolution,” &c. (p. ix.), and he made 
his notes for their own sake. With Jefferies himself, how- 
ever, living at a later age amid the Darwinian stir, question 
