Again, though Thoreau was short of stature and Jefferies tall, there is something similar in their faces: the lofty forehead; the full, serious eye; the large nose--these are features common to both. And to both was common--but Jefferies had, perhaps, the greater forbearance--a certain impatience with the common herd of mankind who know not, and care not for, Nature. There is another passage on Thoreau by a younger writer,[2] which might just as well have been written, word for word, of Jefferies: "The quality which we should call mystery in a painting, and which belongs so particularly to the aspect of the external world and to its influence upon our feelings, was one which he was never weary of attempting to reproduce in his books. The seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they waken in the mind of man, continued to surprise and stimulate his spirits. It appeared to him, I think, that if we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct upon our pages; and that, if it were once thus captured and expressed, a new and instructive relation might appear between men's thoughts and the phenomena of nature. This was the eagle that he pursued all his life long, like a schoolboy with a butterfly net. Hear him to a friend: 'Let me suggest a theme for you--to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, returning to this essay again and again until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it.'" [2] Robert Louis Stevenson, "Men and Books: _Thoreau_." Chatto and Windus, London. It was not until Jefferies had thoroughly mastered this lesson, and saturated himself with its spirit, that he began to write well. No one would believe that the same hand which wrote "The Scarlet Shawl" also wrote "The Pageant of Summer." I firmly believe that it is not until a man obtains the great gift of beautiful thought that he can even begin to understand the beauty of style. To some such thoughts come early; to others, late. When Jefferies left men for the fields, and not till then, his mind became every day more and more charged with beauty of thought, and his style grew correspondingly day by day more charged with beauty. This beauty of thought grows in him out of the intense love, the passionate love, which he has for everything in Nature: it is the child of that love: it is Nature's reward for that love: he loves not only flowers and trees, but every flower, every tree; he is even contented to look upon the same trees, the same hedges filled with flowers every day: