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RICHARD JEFFERIES

(1848-1887)

HE art in which Richard Jefferies excelled is called in German "Tonkunst." It has been so little practiced among English writers that there is no English name for it except "word painting," which is inadequate. It is the art of describing natural objects and of presenting ideas in symphonies and harmonies of tone. It need not be said that while poetry depends upon it for all its forms of expression, it belongs to prose only when it is employed by a master great enough in his art, not to sacrifice sense to sound or sound to sense. No recent writer has illustrated the possibilities of this art better than Jefferies has done in his descriptions of nature.

He was born in Wiltshire, England, November 6th, 1848. His love of nature and the keenness of his vision for the infinite art it manifests appeared in his work from the first, but "Wild Life in a Southern Country," which appeared in 1879, is the first of his important nature studies. He wrote novels and tales, which were received with some favor, but the sketches of life in the woods and fields which he continued to write until his death (August 14th, 1887) give him his claim to enduring reputation. As an observer of nature, he is en titled to be classed with John Burroughs in America.

TH

A ROMAN BROOK

HE brook has forgotten me, but I have not forgotten the brook. Many faces have been mirrored since in the flowing water, many feet have waded in the sandy shallow. I wonder if any one else can see it in a picture before the eyes as I can, bright and vivid as the trees suddenly shown at night by a great flash of lightning. All the leaves and branches and the birds at roost are visible during the flash. It is barely a second; it seems much longer. Memory, like the lightning, reveals the pictures in the mind. Every curve, and shore, and shallow is as familiar now as when I followed the winding stream so often. When the mowing grass was at its height you could not walk far beside the bank; it grew so thick and strong and full of umbelliferous

plants as to weary the knees. The life, as it were, of the meadows seemed to crowd down toward the brook in summer to reach out and stretch toward the life-giving water. There the buttercups were taller and closer together, nails of gold driven so thickly that the true surface was not visible. Countless rootlets drew up the richness of the earth like miners in the darkness, throwing their petals of yellow ore broadcast above them. With their fullness of leaves the hawthorn bushes grow larger-the trees extend further-and thus overhung with leaf and branch, and closely set about by grass and plant, the brook disappeared only a little way off, and could not have been known from a mound and hedge. It was lost in the plain of meads—the flowers alone saw its sparkle.

Hidden in those bushes and tall grasses, high in the trees and low on the ground, there were the nests of happy birds. In the hawthorns blackbirds and thrushes built, often overhanging the stream, and the fledgelings fluttered out into the flowery grass. Down among the stalks of the umbelliferous plants, where the grasses were knotted together, the nettle-creeper concealed her treasure, having selected a hollow by the bank so that the scythe should pass over. Up in the pollard ashes and willows, here and there, wood pigeons built. Doves cooed in the little wooden inclosures where the brook curved almost round upon itself. If there was a hollow in the oak a pair of starlings chose it, for there was no advantageous nook that was not seized on. Low beside the willow stoles the sedge reedlings built; on the ledges of the ditches, full of flags, moor hens made their nests. After the swallows had coursed long miles over the meads to and fro, they rested on the tops of the ashes and twittered sweetly. Like the flowers and grass, the birds were drawn toward the brook. They built by it, they came to it to drink; in the evening a grasshopper lark trilled in a hawthorn bush. By night, crossing the footbridge, a star sometimes shone in the water under foot. At morn and even the peasant girls came down to dip; their path was worn through the mowing grass, and there was a flat stone let into the bank as a step to stand on. Though they were poorly habited, without one line of form or tint of color that could please the eye, there is something in dipping water that is Greek - Homeric-something that carries the mind home to primitive times. Always the little children came with them; they too loved the brook like the grass and the birds. They wanted to see the

fishes dart away and hide in the green flags; they flung daisies and buttercups into the stream to float and catch awhile at the flags, and float again and pass away, like the friends of our boyhood, out of sight. Where there was pasture roan cattle came to drink, and horses, restless horses, stood for hours by the edge under the shade of ash trees. With what joy the spaniel plunged in, straight from the bank out among the flags-you could mark his course by seeing their tips bend as he brushed them in swimming. All life loved the brook.

Far down away from the roads and hamlets there was a small orchard on the very bank of the stream, and just before the grass grew too high to walk through I looked in the inclosure to speak to its owner. He was busy with his spade at a strip of garden, and grumbled that the hares would not let it alone, with all that stretch of grass to feed on. Nor would the rooks, and the moor hens ran over it, and the water rats burrowed; the wood pigeons would have the peas, and there was no rest from them all. While he talked and talked, far from the object in hand, as aged people will, I thought how the apple tree in blossom before us cared little enough who saw its glory. The branches were in bloom everywhere, at the top as well as at the side,—at the top where no one could see them but the swallows. They did not grow for human admiration: that was not their purpose; that is our affair only- we bring the thought to the tree. On a short branch low down the trunk there hung the weather-beaten and broken handle of an earthenware vessel; the old man said it was a jug, one of the old folk's jugs,- he often dug them up. Some were cracked, some nearly perfect; lots of them had been thrown out to mend the lane. There were some chips among the heap of weeds yonder. These fragments were the remains of Anglo-Roman pottery. Coins had been found-half a gallon of them-the children had had most. He took one from his pocket, dug up that morning; they were of no value,- they would not ring. The laborers tried to get some ale for them, but could not; no one would take the little brass things. That was all he knew of the Cæsars: the apples were in fine bloom now, weren't they?

Fifteen centuries before there had been a Roman station at the spot where the lane crossed the brook. There the centurions rested their troops after their weary march across the downs, for the lane, now bramble-grown and full of ruts, was then a Roman road. There were villas, and baths, and fortifications; these things

you may read about in books. They are lost now in the hedges, under the flowering grass, in the ash copses, all forgotten in the lane, and along the footpath where the June roses will bloom after the apple blossom has dropped. But just where the ancient military way crosses the brook, there grow the finest, the largest, the bluest, and most lovely forget-me-nots that ever lover gathered for his lady.

The old man, seeing my interest in the fragments of pottery, wished to show me something of a different kind lately discovered. He led me to a spot where the brook was deep, and had somewhat undermined the edge. A horse trying to drink there had pushed a quantity of earth into the stream and exposed a human skeleton lying within a few inches of the water. Then I looked up the stream and remembered the buttercups and tall grasses, the flowers that crowded down to the edge; I remembered the nests, and the dove cooing; the girls that came down to dip, the children who cast their flowers to float away. The wind blew the loose apple bloom and it fell in showers of painted snow. Sweetly the greenfinches were calling in the trees; afar the voice of the cuckoo came over the oaks. By the side of the living water, the water that all things rejoiced in, near to its gentle sound, and the sparkle of sunshine on it, had lain this sorrowful thing.

Complete. From "Bits of Oak Bark.»

VI-148

THOMAS JEFFERSON

(1743-1826)

EFFERSON Wrote several essays in the artistic form Aristotle insists on for a poem-with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But it was an accident. He was a great artist in the construction of state papers. The Declaration of Independence has no equal as a piece of composition among the state papers of any other country. In America its only rival is Washington's Farewell Address and its only superior Jefferson's own First Inaugural Address. As a writer of political letters, Jefferson is so easily first that he has no good second. He had an almost incomparable genius for working through others, and he made letter writing the means of exercising it. His letters mount from the hundreds into the thousands, and the style he gets from his correspondence appears in his more formal writing. In his "Notes on Virginia," however, he frequently approximates the essay, and once or twice achieves it in due form. But in everything except his state papers, he is obviously careless of form; while over and above the form in whatever he writes are the ideas which have worked in all the ferment of eighteenth and nineteenth century politics.

THE

TRUTH AND TOLERATION AGAINST ERROR

HE first settlers in this country were emigrants from England, of the English Church, just at a point of time when it was flushed with complete victory over the religious of all other persuasions. Possessed, as they became, of the powers of making, administering, and executing the laws, they showed equal intolerance in this country with their Presbyterian brethren, who had emigrated to the northern government. The poor Quakers were flying from persecution in England. They cast their eyes on these new countries as asylums of civil and religious freedom; but they found them free only for the reigning sect. Several acts of the Virginia Assembly of 1659, 1662, and 1693, had made it penal in parents to refuse to have their children baptized; had prohibited the unlawful assembling of Quakers; had

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