'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.'