'The heart has a yearning for the unknown, a longing to penetrate the deep shadow and the winding glade, where, as it seems, no human foot has been';
when he speaks of the '_visible_ silence' of the old church, or exclaims:
'To us, each hour is of consequence, especially in this modern day, which has invented the detestable creed that time is money. But time is not money to Nature. She never hastens....'
But already he is expressing a thought, which he was often to repeat in his maturity and in his best work, when he says of the church-bell that 'In the day when this bell was made, men put their souls into their works. Their one great object was not to turn out 100,000 all alike.'
It was in the next year, 1876, that he began to think of using his observation and feeling in a 'chatty style,' of setting down 'some of the glamour--the magic of sunshine, and green things, and clear waters.' But it was not until 1878 that he succeeded in doing so. In 'The Amateur Poacher' and its companions, there was not between Jefferies and Nature the colourless, clear light of the factory or the journalist's workshop, but the tender English atmosphere or, if you like, that of the happy and thoughtful mind which had grown up in that atmosphere.
'Choosing a Gun' and 'Skating' belong to the period, if not the year, of 'The Amateur Poacher.' In fact, the passage about the pleasure of having the freedom of the woods with a wheel-lock, is either a first draft of one of the best in that book, or it is an unconscious repetition. Here again is a characteristic complaint that 'the leading idea of the gunmaker nowadays is to turn out a hundred thousand guns of one particular pattern.' The suggestion that some clever workman should go and set himself up in some village is one that has been followed in other trades, and is not yet exhausted. The writing is now excellent of its kind, but for the word 'Metropolis' and the phrase 'no great distance from' Pall Mall. The negligent--but slowly acquired--conversational simplicity captures the open air as calmly and pleasantly as the humour of the city dialogue.
'Skating' is slight enough, but ends with grace and an unsought solemnity which comes more and more into his later writing, so that in 'The Spring of the Year' (_Longman's_, June, 1894), after many notes about wood-pigeons, there comes such a genuine landscape as this: