98 
RICHARD JEFFERIES— NATURALIST AND 
IDEALIST. 
By HENRY D. SHAW CROSS. December 1th, 1909. 
The story of Richard Jefferies’ life is simple and sad. He 
was born in 1848, the son of a yeoman farmer of Coate, in 
Wiltshire. As a boy he gave no special promise. He had 
an inborn love of books, and became an eager and wide, though 
somewhat indiscriminate, reader. He spent much of his 
time in wanderings in the fields, during which he was making 
extensive observations of nature. His literary genius did 
not mature till long afterwards. As a young man he was 
occupied for a time in journalistic work at Swindon. He 
tried fiction, but failed. Through the medium of a chance 
letter to “ The Times,” he caught the public ear, and in a 
little while he found some success and recognition. He 
married and settled down in London, and there he began to 
write the series of rich, warm, and exquisitely beautiful essays 
on country scenes and aspects of nature by which he is best 
known. In these essays Jefferies brings, as perhaps no other 
writer does, the very atmosphere of the country-side to his 
readers. It is very sad that at the very period when Jefferies’ 
genius reached its greatest heights and most beautiful ex- 
pression he was slowly sinking to a premature death. Always 
delicate, almost incessant ill-health afflicted him during his 
residence in London ; yet it was in the darkest hours of his 
life that his work took on an immortal loveliness. 
In 1881 he fell ill of a painful internal malady in which 
he lingered for six years, dying in 1887. He worked to the 
last, dictating when he could no longer write. He lies buried 
in a secluded spot on the south coast, his grave within sound 
of the everlasting voices of the sea which he loved so well. 
Richard Jefferies was more than a son of the soil in the 
narrow sense of the words : he was a veritable child of the 
earth in the wider sense, a man who entered fully into the 
