uned
so much with Nature, that he is intoxicated with her fulness and her
beauty. He lies upon the turf, and feels the embrace of the great round
world." {147}

Even apart from fiction, his earlier work varied greatly in quality.
With the publication of _The Game-keeper at Home_, it was clear that a
new force had entered English literature. A man of temperamental
sympathies with men like Borrow and Thoreau, nevertheless with a power
and individuality of his own. But if increasing years brought
comparative recognition, they brought also fresh physical infirmities.
The last few years of his life were one prolonged agony, and yet his
finest work was done in them, and that splendid prose-poem, "The Pageant
of Summer," was dictated in the direst possible pain. As the physical
frame grew weaker the passion for the Earth grew in intensity; and in his
writing there is all that desperate longing for the great healing forces
of Nature, that ecstasy in the glorious freedom of the open air,
characteristic of the sick man.

At its best Jefferies' style is rich in sensuous charm, and remarkable no
less for its eloquence of thought than for its wealth of observation.

III

One characteristic of his art is of especial interest; I mean the
mystical quality which he imparts to certain of his descriptions of
Nature. The power of mystic suggestion is a rare one; even poets like
Keats and Shelley could not always command it successfully--and perhaps
Blake, Coleridge, and Rossetti alone of our poets possessed it in the
highest degree. It is comparatively an easy matter to deal with the
mysticism of the night. The possibilities of darkness readily impress
the imagination. But the mysticism of the sunlight--the mysticism not of
strange shapes, but of familiar things of every day, this, though felt by
many, is the most difficult thing in the world to suggest in words.

The "visions" of Jefferies, his moods of emotional exaltation, recall not
only the opium dream of De Quincey, but the ecstasies of the old Mystics.
The theological colouring is not present, but there is the same sharpened
condition of the senses, the same spiritual hunger for a fuller life, the
same sense of physical detachment from the body.

In that fascinating volume of autobiography _The Story of my Heart_,
Jefferies gives many remarkable instances of these visions. Here is
one:--

"I looked at the hills, at the dewy grass, and then up through the