It is a pageant, the pageant of the moment which passes and yet abides, ever old and ever young. It delights in “the old road, the same flowers.” It accepts the wind’s whispering that “there never was a yesterday, and never will be a to-morrow.” It finds “always hope in the hills.” “All the grasses of the meadow were my pets,” wrote Jefferies of his childhood’s days. “I loved them all.” Of poppies, “there is genius in them,” he proclaims, “the genius of colour, and they are saved.” With Thoreau he will abandon all for which most men labour to hear one cricket sing. “I found from the dandelion,” he cries, “that there were no books.” “The sunlight puts out the words of the printed books as it puts out the fire; the very grass blades confound the wise.” To that sunlight he brings as a testing instrument all clamorous and appealing things: the hopes and dreams and perplexing ways of men. He is a worshipper of the sun, falling in the afternoon in Trafalgar Square, on the crowded Brighton promenade, in the woods of high June, or under a cold November day. He applauds it stored in the gold of the wheat or woven into the petals of the rose. “More sunshine; more flowers” is a perpetual hope for the future of mankind. For this sunshine is life--riotous, confident, unashamed; life congruous to and illuminating all the physical beauty of the human body, of the world of out of doors; the life which made him almost intoxicated with the marbles in the British Museum, which drew him, resisting, to the unknown city multitudes; which left him in childhood on the downs, “utterly alone with the sun and the earth,” lost in an ecstasy, an inflatus at “the inexpressible beauty of it all.”