Looking at him first of all as an artist, the most obvious thing that
strikes a reader is his power to convey sensuous impressions. He loved
the Earth, not as some have done with the eye or ear only, but with every
nerve of his body. His scenic pictures are more glowing, more ardent
than those of Thoreau. There was more of the poet, less of the
naturalist in Jefferies. Perhaps it would have been juster to call
Thoreau a poetic naturalist, and reserved the term poet-naturalist for
Jefferies. Be that as it may, no one can read Jefferies--especially such
books as _Wild Life in a Southern County_, or _The Life of the Fields_,
without realizing the keen sensibility of the man to the sensuous
impressions of Nature.
Again and again in reading Jefferies one is reminded of the poet Keats.
There is the same physical frailty of constitution and the same rare
susceptibility to every manifestation of beauty. There is, moreover, the
same intellectual devotion to beauty which made Keats declare Truth and
Beauty to be one. And the likeness goes further still.
The reader who troubles to compare the sensuous imagery of the three
great Nature poets--Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, will realize an
individual difference in apprehending the beauties of the natural world.
Wordsworth worships with his ear, Shelley with his eye, Keats with his
sense of touch. Sound, colour, feeling--these things inform the poetry
of these great poets, and give them their special individual charm.
Now, in Jefferies it is not so much the colour of life, or the sweet
harmonies of the Earth, that he celebrates, though of course these things
find a place in his prose songs. It is the "glory of the sum of things"
that diffuses itself and is felt by every nerve in his body.