Jefferies, when eighteen, began his "Story of My Heart,"[31] which he said was an absolutely true confession of the stages of emotion in a soul from which all traces of tradition and learning were erased, and which stood face to face with nature and the unknown. His heart long seemed dusty and parched for want of feeling, and he frequented a hill, where the pores of his soul opened to a new air. "Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air and the distant sea.... I desired to have its strength, its mystery and glory. I addressed the sun, desiring the sole equivalent of his light and brilliance, his endurance, and unwearied race. I turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its exquisite color and sweetness. The rich blue of the unobtainable flower of the sky drew my soul toward it, and there it rested, for pure color is the rest of the heart. By all these I prayed. I felt an emotion of the soul beyond all definition; prayer is a puny thing to it." He prayed by the thyme; by the earth; the flowers which he touched; the dust which he let fall through his fingers; was filled with "a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus I prayed.... I hid my face in the grass; I was wholly prostrated; I lost myself in the wrestle.... I see now that what I labored for was soul life, more soul learning." After gazing upward he would turn his face into the grass, shutting out everything with hands each side, till he felt down into the earth and was absorbed in it, whispering deep down to its center. Every natural impression, trees, insects, air, clouds, he used for prayer, "that my soul might be more than the cosmos of life." His "Lyra" prayer was to live a more exalted and intense soul life; enjoy more bodily pleasure and live long and find power to execute his designs. He often tried, but failed for years to write at least a meager account of these experiences. He felt himself immortal just as he felt beauty. He was in eternity already; the supernatural is only the natural misnamed. As he lay face down on the grass, seizing it with both hands, he longed for death, to be burned on a pyre of pine wood on a high hill, to have his ashes scattered wide and broadcast, to be thrown into the space he longed for while living, but he feared that such a luxury of resolution into the elements would be too costly. Thus his naked mind, close against naked mother Nature, wrested from her the conviction of soul, immortality, deity, under conditions as primitive as those of the cave man, and his most repeated prayer was "Give me the deepest soul life."