One characteristic of his art is of especial interest; I mean the
mystical quality which he imparts to certain of his descriptions of
Nature. The power of mystic suggestion is a rare one; even poets like
Keats and Shelley could not always command it successfully--and perhaps
Blake, Coleridge, and Rossetti alone of our poets possessed it in the
highest degree. It is comparatively an easy matter to deal with the
mysticism of the night. The possibilities of darkness readily impress
the imagination. But the mysticism of the sunlight--the mysticism not of
strange shapes, but of familiar things of every day, this, though felt by
many, is the most difficult thing in the world to suggest in words.
The "visions" of Jefferies, his moods of emotional exaltation, recall not
only the opium dream of De Quincey, but the ecstasies of the old Mystics.
The theological colouring is not present, but there is the same sharpened
condition of the senses, the same spiritual hunger for a fuller life, the
same sense of physical detachment from the body.
In that fascinating volume of autobiography _The Story of my Heart_,
Jefferies gives many remarkable instances of these visions. Here is
one:--
"I looked at the hills, at the dewy grass, and then up through the
elm branches to the sky. In a moment all that was behind me--the
house, the people, the sound--seemed to disappear and to leave me
alone. Involuntarily I drew a long breath, then I breathed slowly.
My thought, or inner conscience, went up through the illumined sky,
and I was lost in a moment of exaltation. This lasted only a very
short time, only a part of a second, and while it lasted there was no
formulated wish. I was absorbed. I drank the beauty of the morning.
I was exalted."