session of men's minds; the intellectual
and emotional life of the nation centred more and more round the life of
the city. For a time this was, perhaps, inevitable. For a time Nature
regarded through the eyes of fresh scientific thought had lost her charm.
Even the poets who once had been content to worship, now began to
criticize. Tennyson qualified his homage with reproachings. Arnold
carried his books of philosophy into her presence. But at last men tired
of this questioning attitude. America produced a Whitman; and in England
William Morris and Richard Jefferies--among others--cried out for a
simpler, freer, more childlike attitude.

"All things seem possible," declared Jefferies, "in the open air." To
live according to Nature was, he assured his countrymen, no poet's fancy,
but a creed of life. He spoke from his own experience; life in the open,
tasting the wild sweetness of the Earth, had brought him his deepest
happiness; and he cried aloud in his exultation, bidding others do
likewise. "If you wish your children," says he, "to think deep things,
to know the holiest emotions, take them to the woods and hills, and give
them the freedom of the meadows." On the futility of bookish learning,
the ugliness and sordidness of town life, he is always discoursing. His
themes were not fresh ones; every reformer, every prophet of the age had
preached from the same text. And none had put the case for Nature more
forcibly than Wordsworth when he lamented--

"The world is too much with us."

But the plea for saner ways of living cannot be urged too often, and if
Jefferies in his enthusiasm exaggerates the other side of the picture,
pins his faith over much on solitudes and in self-communion, too little
on the gregarious instincts of humankind, yet no reformer can make any
impression on his fellows save by a splendid one-sidedness.

The defect of his Nature creed which calls for the most serious criticism
is not the personal isolation on which he seems to insist. We herd
together so much--some unhappily by necessity, some by choice, that it
would be a refreshing thing, and a wholesome thing, for most of us to be
alone, more often face to face with the primal forces of Nature.

The serious defect in his thought seems to me to lie in his attitude
towards the animal creation. It is summed up in his remark: "There is
nothing human in any living Animal. All Nature, the Universe as far as
we see, is anti- or ul