f a very high
authority--Dr. Maurice Bucke, in 'Cosmic Consciousness'--an
imperfect experience, and his state is described as 'the twilight
of cosmic consciousness.' Dr. Bucke gives as the marks of the
cosmic sense--a subjective light on its appearance; moral
elevation; intellectual illumination; the sense of immortality;
loss of the fear of death and of the sense of sin; the suddenness
of the awakening which takes place usually at a little past the
thirtieth year, and comes only to noble characters (_e.g._, Pascal,
Blake, Balzac, and Whitman); a charm added to the personality; a
transfiguration of the subject in the eyes of others when the
cosmic sense is actually present. Jefferies appears to have lacked
the subjective light and the full sense of immortality. 'If,' says
Dr. Bucke, 'he had attained to cosmic consciousness, he would have
entered into eternal life, and there would be no "seems" about it;'
while he finds positive evidence against Jefferies' possession of
the perfect cosmic sense in his 'contempt for the assertion that
all things occur for the best.' The sense varied in intensity with
Jefferies, and in its everyday force was not much more than
Kingsley's 'innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if
I could but understand it,' which 'feeling of being surrounded with
truths which I cannot grasp amounts to indescribable awe
sometimes.'

Cosmic consciousness, the half-grasped power which gave its
significance to his autobiography, to 'The Dawn,' 'The Sun and the
Brook' (_Knowledge_, October 13, 1882), 'On the Downs' (_Standard_,
March 23, 1883), 'Nature and Eternity' (_Longman's_, May, 1895), and
many other papers, may have been the faculty for which Jefferies
prayed in 'The Story of My Heart,' and to which he desired that
mankind should advance. In Dr. Bucke's view, an imperfectly
supported one, men with this faculty are becoming more and more
common, and he thinks that 'our descendants will sooner or later
reach, as a race, the condition of cosmic consciousness, just as
long ago our ancestors passed from simple to self consciousness.'

In Jefferies the development of this sense was gradual. Phrases
suggesting that it is in progress may be found in earlier books--in
the novels, in 'Wood Magic' and 'Bevis'--but 'The Story of My
Heart' is the first that is inspired by it; and after that, all his
best work is affected either by the same fervour and solemnity, or
by its accompanying ideas, or by bo