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.

Jefferies, feverish, excitable, passionate, alive to the glorious
plenitude of the Earth, has seized upon the exceeding beauty, and the
healing beauty of natural things. No scholar like Thoreau, he brings no
system of thought, as did the American, for Nature to put into shape.
Outside of Nature all is arid and profitless to him. He comes to her
with empty hands, and seeks for what she may give him. To Thoreau the
Earth was a kind and gracious sister; to Jefferies an all-sufficing
mistress.

The reader who passes from Thoreau to Jefferies need have no fear tha