ng, no past or
future, only now, which is eternity. In _The Story of my Heart_, a
rhapsody of mystic experience and aspiration he describes in detail
several such moments of exaltation or trance. He seems to be peculiarly
sensitive to sunshine. As the moon typifies to Keats the eternal essence
in all things, so to Jefferies the sun seems to be the physical
expression or symbol of the central Force of the world, and it is
through gazing on sunlight that he most often enters into the trance
state.

Standing, one summer's morning, in a recess on London Bridge, he looks
out on the sunshine "burning on steadfast," "lighting the great heaven;
gleaming on my finger-nail."

"I was intensely conscious of it," he writes, "I felt it; I felt
the presence of the immense powers of the universe; I felt out into
the depths of the ether. So intensely conscious of the sun, the
sky, the limitless space, I felt too in the midst of eternity then,
in the midst of the supernatural, among the immortal, and the
greatness of the material realised the spirit. By these I saw my
soul; by these I knew the supernatural to be more intensely real
than the sun. I touched the supernatural, the immortal, there that
moment."[23]

When he reaches this state, outer things drop away,[24] and he seems to
become lost, and absorbed into the being of the universe. He partakes,
momentarily, of a larger, fuller life, he drinks in vitality through
nature. The least blade of grass, he says, or the greatest oak, "seemed
like exterior nerves and veins for the conveyance of feeling to me.
Sometimes a very ecstasy of exquisite enjoyment of the entire visible
universe filled me."[25]

This great central Life Force, which Jefferies, like Wordsworth, seemed
at moments to touch, he, in marked contrast to other mystics, refuses to
call God. For, he says, what we understand by deity is the purest form
of mind, and he sees no mind in nature. It is a force without a mind,
"more subtle than electricity, but absolutely devoid of consciousness
and with no more feeling than the force which lifts the tides."[26] Yet
this cannot content him, for later he declares there must be an
existence higher than deity, towards which he aspires and presses with
the whole force of his being. "Give me," he cries, "to live the deepest
soul-life now and always with this 'Highest Soul.'"[27]

This thrilling consciousness of spiritual life felt through