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LOOKING out of the study windows this morning, Rosalind noticed a sudden change in the group of willows on the hill. There was a tinge of fresh color in the mass of twigs which we recognized as the earliest harbinger of spring. In the sky there was a - momentary softness of tone which turned the dial of thought forward on the instant, and we waited expectant for the reedy note that should tell us of the coming of the birds and the freshness of the early summer on the woods and hills. The illusion lasts but a moment, for the March winds are rising, and the gray clouds will soon overshadow the sky. But fancy has been loosened, and will not return to its wonted subjection to the work of the day. The subject one is studying is flat, stale, and unprofitable; one no sooner settles down to it than the fragrance of the apple blossom, borne from some silent field of memory or from some sunny orchard of the imagination, turns all the eager search for knowledge into ashes. When such a mood comes, as come it will when prophecies of spring are abroad, it is better to yield to the spell than to make a futile resistance.

There is a volume close at hand which fits the day and the mood. It is Richard Jefferies's "Field and Hedgerow," the last word of one through whose heart and hand so much of the ripe loveliness of the English summer passed into English speech. One has but to open its pages and he finds himself between the blossoming hedges waiting for that thrilling music which lies hidden with the nightingale in the copse. I give myself up to the spell of this beautiful book, and straightway I am loitering in the wheat fields; I cross the old bridge where the once busy wheel has grown decrepit and moss-covered with age; I stroll through the deer park, shaded by venerable oaks; I pause at last in the old village where the repose and quaintness of an earlier and more rustic age still linger. Every flower, every grass, every tree, every bird, is known to my companion; and he knows, also, every road and by-path. Nothing escapes his eye, nothing eludes the record of his memory: "Acres of perfume come on the wind from the black and white of the bean field; the firs fill the air by the copse with perfume. I know nothing to which the wind has not some happy use. Is there a grain of dust so small the wind shall not find it out? Ground in the mill-wheel of the centuries, the iron of the distant mountain floats like gossamer, and is drank up as dew by leaf and living lung. A thousand miles of cloud go by from morn till night, passing overhead without a sound; the immense packs, a mile square, succeed to each other,

side by side, laid parallel, book-shape, coming up from the horizon and widening as they approach. From morn till night the silent footfalls of the ponderous vapors travel overhead, no sound, no creaking of the wheels and rattling of the chains; it is calm at the earth; but the wind labors without an effort above, with such ease, with such power. Gray smoke hangs on the hillside where the couch-heaps are piled, a cumulus of smoke; the wind comes, and it draws its length along like the genii from the earthen pot; there leaps up a great red flame, shaking its head; it shines in the bright sunlight; you can see it across the valley."

But, as I read, the moving world about me grows vague and indistinct; I find myself thinking more and more of my companion. What a glance is his which sweeps the horizon and leaves no stir of life unnoted; which follows the bird in its flight and detects the instinct which builds its nest and evokes its song; which searches the field and records every change in the tiny flower of the grass! How spacious must be the mind, how full the heart, how self-centered the life, when one matches with the immeasurable beauty of the world the genius which searches the heart of it all! This man surely must see his own way clear, must hold his own course without doubt or question, must need no help of human recognition, while his eye sees with such unerring clearness and his heart beats with the heart of nature herself! Was it so with Jefferies? I turn

from the book and recall the story of his long, heroic struggles with poverty, ending at last in a great agony of disease and death. Not quite three years ago he wrote: "I received letters from New Zealand, from the United States, even from the islands of the Pacific, from people who had read my writings. It seemed so strange that I should read these letters, and yet all the time be writhing in agony." "With truth I think I may say that there are few, very few, perhaps none, living who have gone through such a series of diseases. There are many dead-many who have killed themselves for a tenth part of the pain; there are few living." And a friend has written of him: "Who can picture the torture of these long years to him, denied as he was the strength to walk so much as one hundred yards in the world he loved so well? What hero like this, fighting with Death face to face so long, fearing and knowing, alas! too well, that no struggles could avail, and, worse than all, that his dear ones would be left friendless and penniless? Thus died a man whose name will be first, perhaps forever, in his own special work." I turn to the last words written by his pen three years ago this spring: "I wonder to myself how they can all get on without me; how they manage, bird and flower, without ME, to keep the calendar for them. . . . They go on without me, orchis-flower and cowslip. I cannot number them all. I hear, as it were, the patter of their feetflower and buds, and the beautiful clouds that go

over, with the sweet rush of rain and burst of sunglory among the leafy trees. They go on, and I am no more than the least of the empty shells that strew the sward of the hill." He has told the heart of his story in a sentence: "Three great giants are against me: disease, despair, and poverty."

These terrible words, in which the uttermost agony of a human soul speaks, blot out for the moment the vision of fair fields and golden weather: and one closes the book and falls to thinking. The story is an old one; it has been told of many a great heart whose work freights these cases with the weight of immortal thought; and it is the consciousness that these teachers and singers, these strong, unconquerable spirits, these loyal, aspiring souls, have shared with us the common lot of men, have suffered and despaired with the great army of humanity, which gives their works sustaining power. These books, in which we read the story of our own lives, were not the work of demi-gods secluded from the uncertainty and bitterness of human fortune in some serene world of art; our weaknesses, our irresolution, our temptations, our blindnesses and misgivings, were theirs also. And if they have held to the truth of their visions and the reality of their ideals, it has not been because they escaped the common lot, but because they held their way through it with unshaken resolution. Genius does not separate its possessors from their fellows; it makes them the more human by its power to uncover the deeps of

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