Then why should _Kubla Khan_ be rated as a less “pure” delight than one of the experiences retailed in _The Story of my Heart_? Is our imagination so restricted that it cannot enjoy both the subtleties of Coleridge and the fuller muse of Jefferies? The healing power of Nature has never found happier expression than in _The Story of my Heart_. In words of simple eloquence he tells us how he cured the weariness and bitterness of spirit by a journey to the seashore. “The inner nature was faint, all was dry and tasteless; I was weary for the pure fresh springs of thought. Some instinctive feeling uncontrollable drove me to the sea. . . . Then alone I went down to the sea. I stood where the foam came to my feet, and looked out over the sunlit waters. The great earth bearing the richness of the harvest, and its hills golden with corn, was at my back; its strength and firmness under me. The great sun shone above, the wide sea was before me. The wind came sweet and strong from the waves. The life of the earth and the sea, the glow of the sun filled me; I touched the surge with my hand, I lifted my face to the sun, I opened my lips to the wind. I prayed aloud in the roar of the waves—my soul was strong as the sea, and prayed with the sea’s might. Give me fulness of life like to the sea and the sun, and to the earth and the air; give me fulness of physical life, mind equal and beyond their fulness; give me a greatness and perfection of soul higher than all things; give me my inexpressible desire which swells in me like a tide—give it to me with all the force of the sea.” Those who know Jefferies only by his quieter passages of leisurely observation are surprised when they find such a swirl of passionate longing in his autobiography. IV The points of affinity between Thoreau and Jefferies are sufficiently obvious; and yet no two writers who have loved the Earth, and found their greatest happiness in the life of the woods and fields, as did these two men, have expressed this feeling so variously. Thoreau, quiet, passive, self-contained, has seized upon the large tranquillity of Nature, the coolness and calm, “the central piece subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.” Interspersed with his freshly observed comments on the myriad life about him are moral reflections, shrewd criticism of men and things, quaint and curious illustrations from his scholarly knowledge. But although he may not always talk of the Earth, there is the flavour of the Earth, the sweetness and naturalness of the Earth, about his finest utterances.