It is not Richard Jefferies his catalogue of the things he saw which moves us to admiration and delight, it is his sense sublime which enabled him to rise from the things which are seen to the things which are unseen, to rise above the _hic et nunc_ of the parochial and to peer into the _illuc et tunc_ of the eternal. He saw "into the life of things," and in him the finite stirred emotions which savoured of the infinite. XXV How that all points to the Infinite § 61 Of a sober truth, could we only realise it, all things point to the infinite. Not a cobweb, not a wisp of morning mist, not a toadstool, not a gnat, but has a life-history dating back to the dark womb of Time, or ere even meteoritic dust or incandescent nebulæ were born; dating forward too, could we trace it, to the dark doom of Time, if for Time there be a doom. Who can understand it? Who shall explain it?--any part of it? Take Burns his simple line,-- "Green grow the rashes, O." To explain "green" is not within the power of profoundest oculist and physicist combined: on the question of the colour-sense alone the scientific world is divided and has for years been divided; and of the precise action of chlorophyll--the green colouring-matter of plants--it is almost equally ignorant; while of the train of connected phænomena, from the chemic and catalytic action in the leaf, through the stimulation of the retina, the transmission along the optic nerve, the sensation in the corpora quadrigemina of the brain, to the concept in the mind, we know absolutely nothing. To define and classify the rushes, also; to know exactly their place in the vegetable kingdom and how they came there--their evolution from lower forms, the modifications wrought in their structure by environment and internecine strife--that is beyond the wit of botanist and palæophytologist in one. And as to that simple verb, "to grow," dealing, as it does, with life itself in its inmost penetralia, that has baffled, and probably will for ever baffle, the whole host of physical and metaphysical experimenters and speculators world without end. When we can explain Life, we shall be within measurable distance of explaining the Life-Giver.--Tennyson saw this: "Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of your crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower, but _if_ I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is." § 62