became an easy habit with Jefferies. The talk is of the plainest and
pleasantest here, and full of himself. With his 'I like sparrows,'
he was an older and tenderer man than in 'The Gamekeeper' period.
The paper gives some idea of his habits and haunts round about
Surbiton before the fatal chain of illnesses began at the end of
this year. Personally, I like to know that it was finished on May
10, 1881, at midnight, with 'Antares visible, the summer star,' very
low in the south-east above Banstead Downs, and Lyra and Arcturus
high above in the south, if Jefferies was writing at Tolworth, as
presumably he was. This paper is to be preferred to 'Birds of
Spring'--likeable mainly for the pages on the chiff-chaff and
sedge-warbler--which does much the same thing, in a more formal
manner, for the instruction of readers of _Chambers's_ (March,
1884), who wished to know about our 'feathered visitors.'

'Vignettes from Nature' were posthumously published in _Longman's_
(July, 1895). They abound in touches from the depth and tenderness
of his nature, and when they were written Jefferies had passed into
the most distinct period of his life--the period which gave birth to
his mature ideas, and, in particular, to 'The Story of My Heart.'
The light which he had carried about with him since his youth--a
light so faint that we cannot be sure he was aware of it in
retrospect--now leaped up with a mystic significance. Professor
William James, in 'Varieties of Religious Experience,' describes
four marks by which states of mind may be recognized as mystical.
The subject says that they defy expression. They are 'states of
insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect
... and, as a rule, they carry with them a curious sense of
authority for after-time,' because the mystic believes that 'we both
become one with the Absolute, and we become aware of our oneness.'
They 'cannot be sustained for long ... except in rare instances half
an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyond
which they fade into the light of common day.' And when the mystic
consciousness has set in, 'the mystic feels as if his own will were
in abeyance, and, indeed, sometimes as if he were grasped and held
by a superior power.' Most of the striking cases in Professor
James's collection occurred out of doors. These marks may all be
recognized in Jefferies' record of his own experience--'The Story
of My Heart.' Yet it was, in the opinion o