“Green rushes, long and thick, standing up above the edge of the ditch, told the hour of the year, as distinctly as the shadow on the dial the hour of the day. Green and thick and sappy to the touch, they felt like summer, soft and elastic, as if full of life, mere rushes though they were. On the fingers they left a green scent; rushes have a separate scent of green, so, too, have ferns very different to that of grass or leaves. Rising from brown sheaths, the tall stems, enlarged a little in the middle like classical columns, and heavy with their sap and freshness, leaned against the hawthorn sprays. From the earth they had drawn its moisture, and made the ditch dry; some of the sweetness of the air had entered into their fibres, and the rushes—the common rushes—were full of beautiful summer.” Jefferies’ writings are studies in tactile sensation. This is what brings him into affinity with Keats, and this is what differentiates him from Thoreau, with whom he had much in common. Of both Jefferies and Thoreau it might be said what Emerson said of his friend, that they “saw as with a microscope, heard as with an ear-trumpet.” As lovers of the open air and of the life of the open air, every sense was preternaturally quickened. But though both observed acutely, Jefferies alone felt acutely. “To me,” he says, “colour is a sort of food; every spot of colour is a drop of wine to the spirit.” It took many years for him to realize where exactly his strength as a writer lay. In early and later life he again and again essayed the novel form, but, superior as were his later fictions—_Amaryllis at the Fair_, for instance, to such crude stuff as _The Scarlet Shawl_—it is as a prose Nature poet that he will be remembered. He knew and loved the Earth; the atmosphere of the country brought into play all the faculties of his nature. Lacking in social gifts, reserved and shy to an extreme, he neither knew much about men and women, nor cared to know much. With a few exceptions—for the most part studies of his own kith and kin—the personages of his stories are shadow people; less vital realities than the trees, the flowers, the birds, of whom he has to speak. But where he writes of what he has felt, what he has [Picture: Richard Jefferies] realized, then, like every fine artist, he transmits his enthusiasm to others. Sometimes, maybe, he is so full of his subject, so engrossed with the wonders of the Earth, that the words come forth in a torrent, impetuous, overwhelming. He writes like a man beside himself with sheer joy. _The Life of the Fields_ gives more than physical pleasure, more than an imaginative delight, it is a religion—the old religion of Paganism. He has, as Sir Walter Besant truly said, “communed so much with Nature, that he is intoxicated with her fulness and her beauty. He lies upon the turf, and feels the embrace of the great round world.” {147}