'Skating' is slight enough, but ends with grace and an unsought solemnity which comes more and more into his later writing, so that in 'The Spring of the Year' (Longman's, June, 1894), after many notes about wood-pigeons, there comes such a genuine landscape as this:
'The bare, slender tips of the birches on which they perched exposed them against the sky. Once six alighted on a long birch-branch, bending it down with their weight, not unlike a heavy load of fruit. As the stormy sunset flamed up, tinting the fields with momentary red, their hollow voices sounded among the trees.'
These notes for April and May, 1881, were continued in 'The Coming of Summer,' which forms part of 'Toilers of the Field.' This informal chitchat, addressed chiefly to the amateur naturalist, became an easy habit with Jefferies. The talk is of the plainest and pleasantest here, and full of himself. With his 'I like sparrows,' he was an older and tenderer man than in 'The Gamekeeper' period. The paper gives some idea of his habits and haunts round about Surbiton before the fatal chain of illnesses began at the end of this year. Personally, I like to know that it was finished on May 10, 1881, at midnight, with 'Antares visible, the summer star,' very low in the south-east above Banstead Downs, and Lyra and Arcturus high above in the south, if Jefferies was writing at Tolworth, as presumably he was. This paper is to be preferred to 'Birds of Spring'—likeable mainly for the pages on the chiff-chaff and sedge-warbler—which does much the same thing, in a more formal manner, for the instruction of readers of Chambers's (March, 1884), who wished to know about our 'feathered visitors.'
'Vignettes from Nature' were posthumously published in Longman's (July, 1895). They abound in touches from the depth and tenderness of his nature, and when they were written Jefferies had passed into the most distinct period of his life—the period which gave birth to his mature ideas, and, in particular, to 'The Story of My Heart.' The light which he had carried about with him since his youth—a light so faint that we cannot be sure he was aware of it in retrospect—now leaped up with a mystic significance. Professor William James, in 'Varieties of Religious Experience,' describes four marks by which states of mind may be recognized as mystical. The subject says that they defy expression. They are 'states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect ... and, as a rule, they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time,' because the mystic believes that 'we both become one with the Absolute, and we become aware of our oneness.' They 'cannot be sustained for long ... except in rare instances half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyond which they fade into the light of common day.' And when the mystic consciousness has set in, 'the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and, indeed, sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.' Most of the striking cases in Professor James's collection occurred out of doors. These marks may all be recognized in Jefferies' record of his own experience—'The Story of My Heart.' Yet it was, in the opinion of a very high authority—Dr. Maurice Bucke, in 'Cosmic Consciousness'—an imperfect experience, and his state is described as 'the twilight of cosmic consciousness.' Dr. Bucke gives as the marks of the cosmic sense—a subjective light on its appearance; moral elevation; intellectual illumination; the sense of immortality; loss of the fear of death and of the sense of sin; the suddenness of the awakening which takes place usually at a little past the thirtieth year, and comes only to noble characters (e.g., Pascal, Blake, Balzac, and Whitman); a charm added to the personality; a transfiguration of the subject in the eyes of others when the cosmic sense is actually present. Jefferies appears to have lacked the subjective light and the full sense of immortality. 'If,' says Dr. Bucke, 'he had attained to cosmic consciousness, he would have entered into eternal life, and there would be no "seems" about it;' while he finds positive evidence against Jefferies' possession of the perfect cosmic sense in his 'contempt for the assertion that all things occur for the best.' The sense varied in intensity with Jefferies, and in its everyday force was not much more than Kingsley's 'innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it,' which 'feeling of being surrounded with truths which I cannot grasp amounts to indescribable awe sometimes.'
Cosmic consciousness, the half-grasped power which gave its significance to his autobiography, to 'The Dawn,' 'The Sun and the Brook' (Knowledge, October 13, 1882), 'On the Downs' (Standard, March 23, 1883), 'Nature and Eternity' (Longman's, May, 1895), and many other papers, may have been the faculty for which Jefferies prayed in 'The Story of My Heart,' and to which he desired that mankind should advance. In Dr. Bucke's view, an imperfectly supported one, men with this faculty are becoming more and more common, and he thinks that 'our descendants will sooner or later reach, as a race, the condition of cosmic consciousness, just as long ago our ancestors passed from simple to self consciousness.'
In Jefferies the development of this sense was gradual. Phrases suggesting that it is in progress may be found in earlier books—in the novels, in 'Wood Magic' and 'Bevis'—but 'The Story of My Heart' is the first that is inspired by it; and after that, all his best work is affected either by the same fervour and solemnity, or by its accompanying ideas, or by both. It is to be detected in many sentences in 'Vignettes,' and in the concluding prayer, 'Let the heart come out from the shadow of roofs to the open glow of the sky...'—even in the plea to the mechanics in 'A King of Acres' (Chambers's, January, 1884) not to 'pin their faith to any theory born and sprung up among the crushed and pale-faced life of modern time, but to look for themselves at the sky above the highest branches ... that they might gather to themselves some of the leaves—mental and spiritual leaves—of the ancient forest, feeling nearer to the truth and soul, as it were, that lives on in it.' It is in the aspiration and hope—in the sense of 'hovering on the verge of a great truth,' of 'a meaning waiting in the grass and water,' of a 'wider existence yet to be enjoyed on the earth'—in the 'increased consciousness of our own life,' gained from sun and sky and sea—it is everywhere in 'Sun and Brook' and 'On the Downs.' It suffuses the sensuous delicacy and exuberance and the spiritual joy of 'Nature and Eternity.' That paper belongs to, and in a measure corrects, 'The Story of My Heart.' There is less eloquence than in the autobiography, and a greater proportion of that beautiful simplicity that is so spiritual when combined with the characteristic cadence of Jefferies at his best. The mystic has a view of things by which all knowledge becomes real—or disappears—and all things are seen related to the whole in a manner which gives a wonderful value to the least of them. The combination of sensuousness and spiritual aspiration in this and other essays produces a beauty perhaps peculiar to Jefferies—often a vague beauty imperfectly adumbrated, as was the meaning of the universe itself in his mood of 'thoughts without words, mobile like the stream, nothing compact that can be grasped and stayed: dreams that slip silently as water slips through the fingers.' In 'Nature and Eternity' this is all the more impressive because Coate Farm and its fields, Jefferies' birthplace and early home, is the scene of it. That beauty haunts the last four essays of this book as it haunts 'The Story of My Heart,' like a theme of music, always a repetition, and yet never exactly the same. 'The Dawn' is one of the most beautiful things which Jefferies wrote after his awakening. The cadences are his best—gentle, wistful, not quite certain cadences, where the effect of the mere sound cannot be detached from the effect of the thought hovering behind the sound. How they kindle such a passage as this, where Jefferies again brings before us his sense of past time!—
'But though so familiar, that spectral light in the silence has never lost its meaning, the violets are sweet year by year though never so many summers pass away; indeed, its meaning grows wider and more difficult as the time goes on. For think, this spectre of light—light's double-ganger—has stood by the couch of every human being for thousands and thousands of years. Sleeping or waking, happily dreaming, or wrenched with pain, whether they have noticed it or not, the finger of this light has pointed towards them. When they were building the pyramids, five thousand years ago, straight the arrow of light shot from the sun, lit their dusky forms, and glowed on the endless sand....'
The whole essay is delicately perfect—as free from the spiritual eloquence of the autobiography and from the rhetoric of the agricultural papers as from the everyday atmosphere of earlier work and the decoration of the first outdoor essays. It is pure spirit. Take any passage, and it will be seen that in thought and style Jefferies' evolution is now complete. He has mounted from being a member of a class, at first undistinguishable from it, then clearly more enlightened, but still of it, and seeing things in the same way, up to the position of a poet with an outlook that is purely individual, and, though deeply human, yet of a spirituality now close as the grass, and now as the stars. The date of 'The Dawn' is uncertain. It may have been 1883, the year of 'The Story of My Heart,' or it may have been as late as 1885. This book, therefore, contains, like no other single volume, the record of Jefferies' progress during about ten of his most important years. It was not for nothing that Jefferies, man and boy, had gone through the phases of sportsman, naturalist, and artist, and always worshipper, upon the hills, 'that he lived in a perpetual commerce with external Nature, and nourished himself upon the spirit of its forms.' Air and sun so cleaned and sweetened his work that in the end the cleanness and sweetness of Nature herself become inseparable from it in our minds.