The volumes which mark this most important transition [from naturalist to poet-naturalist] are Wood Magic and Bevis, published in 1881 and 1882 respectively, in both of which the central idea is the intimate sympathetic converse that exists, or is imagined to exist, between childhood and Nature.

The character of Bevis, the boy-hero of both stories, in spite of the tedious length of the narrative, is one of the most charming of Jefferies' creations, and has far more vitality than most of the figures in his novels. For Bevis, apart from his adventurous wanderings and voyages (which interest us chiefly as being actual records of Jefferies' own boyish freaks and imaginings), is the special favourite and confidant of Nature and her familiars—it is to him that the wild animals and birds, the trees and flowers, the streams and winds and sunshine, reveal their passwords and secrets. The well-known passages that describe Bevis' communings with the Wind are not only the best thing in Wood Magic, but the most significant indication of Jefferies' new departure, for both in depth of feeling and power of expression they entirely transcend anything previously written by him. Says the Wind:—

Bevis, my love, if you want to know all about the sun, and the stars, and everything, make haste and come to me, and I will tell you, dear. In the morning, dear, get up as quick as you can, and drink me as I come down from the hill. In the day go up on the hill, dear, and drink me again, and stay there if you can till the stars shine out, and drink still more of me.

And by and by you will understand all about the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and the Earth which is so beautiful, Bevis. It is so beautiful, you can hardly believe how beautiful it is. Do not listen, dear, not for one moment, to the stuff and rubbish they tell you down there in the houses where they will not let me come. If they say the Earth is not beautiful, tell them they do not speak the truth. But it is not their fault, for they have never seen it, and as they have never drank me their eyes are closed, and their ears shut up tight. But every evening, dear, before you get into bed, do you go to your window, and lift the curtain and look up at the sky, and I shall be somewhere about, or else I shall be quiet in order that there may be no clouds, so that you may see the stars. In the morning, as I said before, rush out and drink me up.

In the later volumes, of which Wood Magic was the precursor, this mystic nature-worship is everywhere dominant. It is no longer child-life only that is credited with the wondrous secret; for Jefferies now writes without disguise as one who has received a solemn revelation of the inner beauty of the universe—the wind, the sea, the sunlight, the leaves, the mere dull earth-clods, all are alike sacred to him. "Never was such a worshipper of earth," he exclaims of himself. "The commonest pebble, dusty and marked with the stain of the ground, seems to me so wonderful; my mind works round it till it becomes the sun and centre of a system of thought and feeling. Sometimes moving aside the tufts of grass with careless fingers while resting on the sward, I found these little pebble-stones loose in the crumbly earth among the rootlets. Then, brought out from the shadow, the sunlight shone and glistened on the particles of sand that adhered to it. Particles adhered to my skin—thousands of years between finger and thumb, these atoms of quartz, and sunlight shining all that time, and flowers blooming and life glowing in all, myriads of living things, from the cold still limpet on the rock to the burning throbbing heart of man."

Or take that marvellous account in The Story of my Heart of his sudden brief pilgrimage to the sea:—

There was a time when a weary restlessness came upon me, perhaps from too-longcontinued labour. It was like a drought—a moral drought—as if I had been absent for many years from the sources of life and hope. The inner nature was faint, all was dry and tasteless; I was weary for the pure fresh springs of thought. Some instinctive feeling uncontrollable drove me to the sea.… I found the sea at last; I walked beside it in a trance away from the houses out into the wheat. The ripe corn stood up to the beach, the waves on one side of the shingle, and the yellow wheat on the other.

There, alone, I went down to the sea. I stood where the foam came to my feet, and looked out over the sunlit waters. The great earth bearing the richness of the harvest, and its hills golden with corn, was at my back; its strength and firmness under me. The great sun shone above, the wide sea was before me, the wind came sweet and strong from the waves. The life of the earth and the sea, the glow of the sun filled me; I touched the surge with my hand, I lifted my face to the sun, I opened my lips to the wind. I prayed aloud in the roar of the waves—my soul was strong as the sea, and prayed with the sea's might. Give me fulness of life like to the sea and the sun, and to the earth and the air; give me fulness of physical life, mind equal and beyond their fulness; give me a greatness and perfection of soul higher than all things; give me my inexpressible desire which swells in me like a tide—give it to me with all the force of the sea.

We thus perceive that what had at first been ostensibly little more than an instinctive love of wild scenery and free out-door pursuits, and a powerful capacity of noting and commemorating the various features of country life, was gradually transformed and expanded into a deliberate personal faith, as Jefferies began more clearly to apprehend the meaning of that "ideal of nature," which, for him, embraced and affected human aspirations and human art no less than the nature which is (or is supposed to be) nonhuman and inanimate. It is one of his latest essays, "Nature in the Louvre," that we find the clearest expression of this creed. Pondering long by the statue of the "Stooping Venus," he thus connects the ideal beauty of Nature with the ideal good of man:—

Old days which I had spent wandering among the deep meadows and by green woods came back to me. In such days the fancy had often occurred to me that besides the loveliness of leaves and flowers, there must be some secret influence drawing me on as a hand might beckon. The light and colour suspended in the summer atmosphere, as colour is in stained but translucent glass, were to me always on the point of becoming tangible in some beautiful form. The hovering lines and shape never became sufficiently defined for me to know what form it could be, yet the colours and the light meant something which I was not able to fix. I was now sitting in a gallery of stone, with cold marbles, cold floors, cold light from the windows. Without, there were only houses, the city of Paris—a city above all other cities farthest from woods and meads. Here, nevertheless, there came back to me this old thought born in the midst of flowers and wind-rustled leaves, and I saw that with it the statue before me was in concord. The living original of this work was the human impersonation of the secret influence which had beckoned me on in the forest and by running streams. She expressed in loveliness of form the colour and light of sunny days; she expressed the deep aspiring desire of the soul for the perfection of the frame in which it is encased, for the perfection of its own existence.… Though I cannot name the ideal good, it seems to me that it will be in some way closely associated with the ideal beauty of nature.

It has already been hinted that Jefferies' London experiences, which first awakened his mind to a more vivid interest in those great human problems which a crowded civilisation must needs face, form a sort of link between his position as a naturalist and his position as a thinker. "Nature," he says in his Story, "was deepened by the crowds and foot-worn stones." In certain moods he delighted in London; partly, perhaps, for the mere sensuous pleasure of the rich spectacles to be seen there (he says in Amaryllis that "to anyone with an eye the best entertainment in the world is a lounge in London streets"), partly also because he could there stimulate his faculty for philosophic meditation. "I am quite as familiar with London as with the country," he wrote to a correspondent. "Some people have the idea that my knowledge is confined to the fields; as a matter of fact, I have had quite as much to do with London—all parts of it, too—and am very fond of what I may call a thickness of the people such as exists there. I like the solitude of the hills, and the hum of the most crowded city; I dislike little towns and villages. I dream in London quite as much as in the woodlands. It's a wonderful place to dream in."

The obvious exaggeration in Jefferies' statement that he was "quite as familiar" with London as with the country, must be set down to the irritating effect of the common but fallacious assumption that the ardent nature lover is unable to appreciate the impressive features of the town. It is quite true that Jefferies, like Thoreau and other poet-naturalists who might be named, could not exist for any lengthy period away from the life of the fields; true also that he remarked, in very uncomplimentary terms, on some of the hideous deformities which a crowded society begets. In his essay on "The London Road," for example, he has a pitiless physiognomical criticism of "the London leer."

That hideous leer is so repulsive—one cannot endure it—but it is so common; you see it on the faces of four-fifths of the ceaseless stream that runs out from the ends of the earth of London into the green sea of the country. It disfigures the faces of the carters who go with the waggons and other vehicles; it defaces—absolutely defaces—the workmen who go forth with vans, with timber, with carpenters' work, and the policeman standing at the corners, in London itself particularly. The London leer hangs on their faces.

Again, in his After London—the very title of which is opprobrious to the patriotic citizen—he draws a sombre picture of the ruins of a defunct civilisation, the pestilent fen which is the sole remnant and residue of the former metropolis of the world. Not even that "City of Dreadful Night" of the pessimist-poet's imagination is more lurid than the scene of which Jefferies' hero is the witness, when he "had penetrated into the midst of that dreadful place, of which he had heard many a tradition; how the earth was poison, the water poison, the air poison, the very light of heaven, falling through such an atmosphere, poison."

But in spite of such passages, Jefferies was keenly sensitive—as sensitive almost as De Quincey himself—to the charm of the great city, and has established a good claim to be reckoned among the foremost of London's eulogists. Like De Quincey, he has pictured the feeling of unrest and irresistible attraction that London exercises on all the surrounding districts. "There is a fascination in it; there is a magnetism stronger than that of the rock which drew the nails from Sindbad's ship. It is not business, for you may have none in the ordinary sense, it is not 'society,' it is not pleasure. It is the presence of man in his myriads. There is something in the heart which cannot be satisfied away from it." He even claims a worldwide scope for this radiating influence. "London," he thinks, "is the only real place in the world. The cities turn towards London as young partridges run to their mother. The cities know that they are not real. They are only houses, and wharves, and bridges, and stucco; only outside. The minds of all men in them, merchants, artists, thinkers, are bent on London. San Francisco thinks London; so does St. Petersburg."

Some of the very best of Jefferies' short essays are devoted to London scenes; for example, those on "Sunlight in a London Square," "Venice in the East End," and "The Pigeons at the British Museum," all of which are included, rather oddly, perhaps, in the volume entitled, The Life of the Fields, where, as if to account for this apparent incongruity, the author remarks in a foot-note that "the sunlight and the wind enter London, and the life of the fields is there too, if you will but see it." In The Open Air, again, we find him writing of "Red Roofs of London," and other similar themes; but it is in The Story of my Heart that he gives the fullest prominence to these studies of London life. No reader of that book can ever forget the wonderful descriptions of an early summer morning on London Bridge, of the visits to the pictures at the National Gallery, and the Greek statues at the Museum, and, above all, of the streams of human life in front of the Royal Exchange.

I used to come and stand near the apex of the promontory of pavement which juts out towards the pool of life; I still go there to ponder. Burning in the sky, the sun shone on me as when I rested in the narrow valley carved in prehistoric time. Burning in the sky, I can never forget the sun. The heat of summer is dry there as if the light carried an impalpable dust; dry, breathless heat that will not let the skin respire, but swathes up the dry fire in the blood. But beyond the heat and light, I felt the presence of the sun as I felt it in the solitary valley, the presence of the resistless forces of the universe; the sun burned in the sky as I stood and pondered. Is there any theory, philosophy, or creed, is there any system or culture, any formulated method able to meet and satisfy each separate item of this agitated pool of human life? By which they may be guided, by which hope, by which look forward? Not a mere illusion of the craving heart—something real, as real as the solid walls of fact against which, like drifted seaweed, they are dashed; something to give each separate personality sunshine and a flower in its own existence now; something to shape this million-handed labour to an end and outcome that will leave more sunshine and more flowers to those who must succeed?

We see, then, that the mysticism which is so marked a feature of Jefferies' later writings was in part a London growth, for it was not until after these reveries on bridge and pavement that his vision faculty found expression. The leading thought by which his autobiographical Story is inspired is the intense and passionate yearning for what he calls "soul-life." Not content with those three ideas which he says the primeval cavemen wrested from the unknown darkness around them—the existence of the soul, immortality, and the deity—he desires to wrest "a fourth, and still more than a fourth, from the darkness of thought." He believes that we are even now on the verge of great spiritual discoveries, that "a great life, an entire civilisation, lies just outside the pale of common thought," and that these soul-secrets may be won by a resolute and sustained endeavour of the human mind. This "fourth idea," which cannot be formulated in words, since there are no words to express it, is the conception of a possible soul-life which is above and beyond the ideas of existence and immortality, beyond even deity itself; a spiritual entity which is even now realised in part by the absorption of the soul, in rapturous moments of reverie and devotion, into the beauty and infinity of the visible universe. In this we are often reminded of De Quincey; but in Jefferies' case there was a more distinct purpose and a deliberate perseverance in the search after the unknown.

But while the "soul-life" formed the first portion of what Jefferies calls his "prayer," the physical life was by no means forgotten or undervalued. His second aspiration is for perfection of physical beauty, the human form being to him the sum and epitome of all that is impressive in nature. To cultivate bodily strength and symmetry is as real and indispensable a duty as to aspire to soul-life, since "to be shapely of form is so infinitely beyond wealth, power, fame, all that ambition can give, that these are dust before it." Seldom have the glories of physical existence—the "wild joys of living," as Browning calls them—been celebrated with such rapturous devotion as in Jefferies' prose poem. Day and night are declared by him to be too short for their full enjoyment—the day should be sixty hours long, the night should offer forty hours of sleep. "Oh, beautiful human life!" he exclaims. "Tears come in my eyes as I think of it. So beautiful, so inexpressibly beautiful!"

We speak of Jefferies as a mystic; but it must not be forgotten that his is the mysticism of no mere visionary of the study or the cloister, but of one of the keenest and most painstaking observers that ever set eyes on nature; a mysticism which, as he himself asserts, is based not on the imaginary, but the real. "From standing face to face so long with the real earth, the real sun, and the real sea, I am firmly convinced that there is an immense range of thought quite unknown to us yet." The passages in The Story of my Hear4 where he seems to be dimly groping his way on the very confines of this spiritual dreamland, and striving to express in words ideas which he knows can only be apprehended by the emotions, are among the most moving and impressive in recent literature; none but Jefferies could have written them, so rich are they in their confident anticipation of future intellectual discoveries, so tenderly pathetic in the sadness of their personal retrospect.…