The Life of the Fields

“The oaks stand - quite still - so still that the lichen loves them...such solace and solitude seventy-nine miles thick cannot be painted...it is necessary to stay in it like oaks to know it. (1884)””

— Richard Jefferies

“The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendour of life, yields a new thought with every petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things so much the more is snatched from inevitable Time.””

— Richard Jefferies

“Summer shows us Matter changing into life, sap rising from the earth through a million tubes, the alchemic power of light entering the solid oak; and see! it bursts forth in countless leaves.””

— Richard Jefferies

“Never could I have enough; never stay long enough”

— Richard Jefferies

“So trustful are the doves, the squirrels, the birds of the branches, and the creatures of the field. Under their tuition let us rid ourselves of mental terrors, and face death itself as calmly as they do the livid lightning; so trustful and so content with their fate, resting in themselves and unappalled. If but by reason and will I could reach the godlike calm and courage of what we so thoughtlessly call the timid turtle-dove, I should lead a nearly perfect life.””

— Richard Jefferies

“Oak follows oak, and elm ranks with elm, however many times reduplicated, their beauty only increases. So, too, the summer days; the sun rises on the same grasses and green hedges, there is the same blue sky, but did we ever have enough of them? No, not in a hundred years!””

— Richard Jefferies

“The sound of summer is everywhere”

— Richard Jefferies

“It is in this marvellous transformation of clods and cold matter into living things that the joy and the hope of summer reside. Every blade of grass, each leaf, each separate floret and petal, is an inscription speaking of hope. So that my hope becomes as broad as the horizon afar, reiterated by every leaf, sung on every bough, reflected in the gleam of every flower.””

— Richard Jefferies

“Never yet have I been able to write what I feel about the sunlight only. Colour and form and light are as magic to me. It is a trance. It is ten years since I have reclined on that grass plot, and yet I have been writing of it as if yesterday, and every blade of grass is as visible and real to me now as then. That beautiful and wonderful light excited a sense of some likewise beautiful or wonderful truth, some unknown but grand thought hovering as a swallow above. There was something here that was not in the books of human knowledge. This is what it intends, this is the explanation of a dream. The very grass-blades confounded the wisest, the tender leaf put them to shame, the grasshopper derided them, the sparrow chirped his scorn.””

— Richard Jefferies