"Out from the last fringe of mist shone a great white globe. Like molten silver, glowing with a lusciousness of light, soft and yet brilliant, so large and bright and seemingly so near--but just above the ridge yonder--shining with heavenly splendour in the very dayspring. He knew Eosphoros, the Light-Bringer, the morning star of hope and joy and love, and his heart went out towards the beauty and the glory of it. Under him the broad bosom of the earth seemed to breathe instinct with life, bearing him up, and from the azure ether came the wind, filling his chest with the vigour of the young day. "The azure ether--yes, and more than that! Who that has seen it can forget the wondrous beauty of the summer morning's sky? It is blue--it is sapphire--it is like the eye of a lovely woman. A rich purple shines through it; no painter ever approached the colour of it, no Titian or other, none from the beginning. Not even the golden flesh of Rubens' women, through the veins in whose limbs a sunlight pulses in lieu of blood shining behind the tissues, can equal the hues that glow behind the blue. "The East flamed out at last. Pencilled streaks of cloud high in the dome shone red. An orange light rose up and spread about the horizon, then turned crimson, and the upper edge of the sun's disk lifted itself over the hill. A swift beam of light shot like an arrow towards him, and the hawthorn bush obeyed with instant shadow; it passed beyond him over the green plain, up the ridge and away. The great orb, quivering with golden flames, looked forth upon the world." The finest of all the papers written by Jefferies--as I have already said--is that called "The Pageant of Summer." It came out in _Longman's Magazine_. I know nothing in the English language finer, whether for the sustained style or for the elevation of thought which fills it. Herein Jefferies surpassed himself as well as all other writers who have written upon Nature. This is perhaps because he fills the "Pageant" which he describes with human love and human regrets. Without the life and presence of man, what is the beauty of Nature worth? I should like to quote it all--nay, to those who have read it again and again, the words live in the memory like the lines of Wordsworth's "Ode to Immortality," and like them they fill the heart with tenderness and the eyes with tears. It is published in the last but one of his books, "The Life of the Fields," which everybody should make haste to possess, if only for this one paper. It opens quietly--with the rushes: