`If we had never before looked upon the earth, but suddenly came to it man or woman grown, set down in the midst of a summer mead, would it not seem to us a radiant vision? The hues, the shapes, the song and life of birds, above all the sunlight, the breath of heaven, resting on it; the mind would be filled with its glory unable to grasp it, hardly believing that such things could be mere matter ... too beautiful to be long watched lest it should fade away.'

The Richard Jefferies House and Museum is dedicated to the memory of one of England's most individual writers on nature and the countryside.The museum is housed in the farmhouse at Coate where Richard Jefferies was born in 1848. His early years were spent wandering around the farmlands, rafting along the nearby streams that fed the canals and swimming in the reservoir - now called Coate Water, about five minutes' walk from the museum. His early life is recorded in a series of novels including 'Bevis - The Story of a Boy!'

Since my early manhood I have been an admirer of the work of Richard Jefferies. He was an English naturalist, novelist, and essayist whose prophetic vision came from detailed observation of nature and his own life. Unappreciated in his own Victorian age, his writings are now embraced by those who are closely affiliated with the nature movement. The son of a yeoman farmer, Jefferies in 1866 became a reporter on the North Wilts Herald.

Recently I made a visit with my son Connor to the beautiful Shropshire countryside of my childhood wartime evacuation. The visit and the sad, nostalgic wandering of the lanes of memory with my son, who at the age of five was exactly my age when the war dragged me apart from my mother, has motivated me to pick up again the beloved book of my youth - the Jefferies classic -  The Story of my Heart that is reproduced on this website.

In the piece that follows, (which you can read in its entirety together with other shorter pieces by Jefferies by returning to the content page,) the author is lying on an ancient tumulus in Wiltshire, wherein an Iron Age warrior lies buried. I have lain on the same greensward of the grassy knoll and felt the same power within and around me, for the area is very close to a place where I was stationed as a young soldier in the Gloucestershire Regiment.

While I think its a beautiful passage, I'm afraid that I don't believe in 'the soul,' or that the soul lives on after death - to me, the 'soul' is an ethereal electro-chemical activity that takes place in the brain, rather like a super developed version of the same electro-chemical actions and reactions that happen when the muscles of the arm or leg contract or extend in order to move. When the body dies and the blood supply to the brain ceases - the brain-cells die, the electro-chemical tumult dissipates and `the light goes out'. That doesn't stop me thoroughly enjoying Jeffrey's' spirituality and longing for immortality, and his moving quest for communion with nature and the conquest of oblivion'

"The story of my heart commences seventeen years ago. I was not more than eighteen when an inner and esoteric meaning began to come to me from all the visible universe, and undefinable aspirations filled me.
I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight. I thought of the earth's firmness---I felt it bear me up; through the grassy couch there came an influence as if I could feel the great earth speaking to me. I thought of the wandering air---its pureness, which is its beauty; the air touched me and gave me something of itself. By all these I prayed; I felt an emotion of the soul beyond all definition.

I thought of my inner existence that consciousness which is called the soul. These---that is, myself---I threw into the balance to weigh the prayer the heavier. My strength of body, mind and soul, I flung into it; I put forther my strength; I wrested and labored and toiled in might of prayer. The prayer, this soul-emotion, was in itself---not for an object---it was a passion. I hid my face in the grass, I was wholly prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, I was rapt and carried away.

Had any shepherd accidentally seen me lying on the turf he would only have thought that I was resting a few minutes; I made no outward show. Who could have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was going on within me as I reclined there! I was greatly exhausted when I reached home.

Have drunk deeply of the heaven above and felt the most glorious beauty of the day, and remembering the old, old sea, which was but just yonder at the edge, I now became lost, and absorbed into the being or existence of the universe. I felt down deep into the earth under, and high above into the sky, and farther still to the sun and stars. Still farther beyond the stars into the hollow of space, and losing thus my separateness of being came to seem like a part of the whole.

With all that time and power I prayed that I might have in my soul the intellectual part of it---the idea the thought. Now, this moment gives me all the thought, all the idea, all the soul expressed in the Cosmos around me. Gives me fullness of life like to the sea, and the sun, to the earth and the air; gives me fullness of physcial life, mind, equal and beyond their fullness; gives me a greatness and perfection of soul higher than all things; gives me my inexpressible desire which swells in me like a tide---gives it to me with all the force of the sea. I realize a soul-life illimitable; I realize the existence of a Cosmos of thought."

Source: Jefferies, Richard. The Story of My Heart,
(London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1883)

All during [Jeffrey's'] life the theme of his work was the creation of a truer more sunlit world of mankind. He was a genius, a visionary whose thought and feeling were wide as the human world, prophet of an age not yet come into being - the age of sun - of harmony. He was derided in his father's house, upbraided for idleness and stupidity; considered `a loony' (mad) by his neighbours. Since a man can only be truly friends with his peers, Jefferies was friendless to his life's end. 'The Story of My Heart.

It is a piece that I often refer to my Christian friends in an effort to show them the sort of thing that I respond to, the sort of 'spirituality' that speaks to me. Now it's no use people writing that I don't believe in the 'spirit,' and therefore I am not capable of feeling 'spiritual.' It's just that I've wracked my lexicon bank and just can't come up with another word to describe what I mean. 'Reverence, curiousness, wonder, awe, and connectedness' perhaps? Or something of all of that?

Another excerpt:

'There was a grass-grown tumulus on the hills to which of old I used to walk, sit down at the foot of one of them, and think. Some warrior had been interred there in ante-historic times. The sun of the summer morning shone on the dome of the sward, and the air came softly up from the wheat below, the tips of the grasses swayed as it passed, sighing faintly, it ceased, and the bees hummed to the thyme and heathbells. I became absorbed in the glory of the day, the sunshine, the sweet air, and the yellowing corn turning from its sappy green to summer's noon of gold, the lark's song like a waterfall in the sky. I felt at that moment that I was like the spirit of the man whose body was interred in the tumulus; I could understand and feel his existence the same as my own. He was as real to me two thousand years after internment as those I'd seen in the body. The abstract personality of the dead seemed as existent as thought. As my thoughts could slip back the twenty centuries in a moment to the forest days when he hurled the spear, or shot with the bow, hunting the deer, and could return again as swiftly to this moment, so his spirit could endure from then till now, and the time was nothing. Two thousand years being a second for the soul couldn't cause its extinction. Recognising my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, death did not seem to me to affect the personality. In dissolution there was no bridgeless chasm, no unfathomable gulf of separation; the spirit did not immediately become inaccessible, leaping at a bound to an immeasurable distance. Look at another person while living; the soul isn't visible, only the body which it animates. Therefore, merely because after death the soul isn't visible is no demonstration that it doesn't still live. The condition of being unseen is the same condition, which occurs while the body is living, so that intrinsically there's nothing exceptional, or supernatural, in the life of the soul after death. Resting by the tumulus, the spirit of the man who had been interred there was to me really alive, and very close. This was quite natural, as natural and simple as the grass waving in the wind, the bee's humming, and the lark's songs. Only by the strongest effort of the mind could I understand the idea of extinction. Extinction, yeah, that was supernatural, requiring a miracle; the immortality of the soul natural, like earth. Listening to the sighing of the grass I felt immortality as I felt the beauty of the summer morning, and I thought beyond immortality, of other conditions, more beautiful than existence, higher than immortality. I'm fully aware that there's no knowing, in the sense of written reasons, whether the soul lives on or not. I don't hope or fear. At least while I'm living I have enjoyed the idea of immortality, and the idea of my own soul. If then, after death, I'm resolved without exception into earth, air and water, and the spirit goes out like a flame, still I shall have had the glory of that thought.

The source of a large part of the biological information is from
http://www.bodysoulandspirit.net/mystical_experiences/read/notables/Jeffrey's.shtml