Well, there it is as glaring and apparent as Borrow’s big green gamp or De Quincey’s insularity. “What business has a Vagabond to moralize?” asks the reader. Yet there is a touch of the Moralist in every Vagabond (especially the English-speaking Vagabond), and its presence in Stevenson gives an additional piquancy to his work. The _Lay Morals_ and the _Christmas Sermon_ may not exhilarate some readers greatly, but there is a fresher note, a larger utterance in the _Fables_. And even if you do not care for Stevenson’s “Hamlet” and “Shorter Catechist” moods, is it wise, even from the artistic point of view, to wish away that side of his temperament? Was it the absence of the “Shorter Catechist” in Edgar Allan Poe that sent him drifting impotently across the world, brilliant, unstable, aspiring, grovelling; a man of many fine qualities and extraordinary intensity of imagination, but tragically weak where he ought to have been strong? And was it the “Shorter Catechist” in Stevenson that gave him that grip-hold of life’s possibilities, imbued him with his unfailing courage, and gave him as Artist a strenuous devotion to an ideal that accompanied him to the end? Or was it so lamentable a defect as certain critics allege? I wonder. VI RICHARD JEFFERIES “Noises of river and of grove And moving things in field and stall And night birds’ whistle shall be all Of the world’s speech that we shall hear.” WILLIAM MORRIS. “The poetry of earth is never dead.” KEATS. I The longing of a full, sensuous nature for fairer dreams of beauty than come within its ken; the delight of a passionate soul in the riotous wealth of the Earth, the luxuriant prodigality of the Earth; the hysterical joy of the invalid in the splendid sanity of the sunlight—these are the sentiments that well up from the writings of Richard Jefferies. By comparison with him, Thoreau’s Earth-worship seems quite a stolid affair, and even Borrow’s frank enjoyment of the open air has a strangely apathetic touch about it. No doubt he felt more keenly than did the Hermit of Walden, or the Norfolk giant, but it was not so much passionate intensity as nervous susceptibility. He had the sensitive quivering nerves of the neurotic which respond to the slightest stimulus. Of all the “Children of the Open Air” Jefferies was the most sensitive; but for all that I would not say that he felt more deeply than Thoreau, Borrow, or Stevenson. Some people are especially susceptible by constitution to pain or pleasure, but it would be rash to assume hastily that on this account they have more deeply emotional natures. That they express their feelings more readily is no guarantee that they feel more deeply. In other words, there is a difference between susceptibility and passion.