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The Life of the Fields
The lost leaves measure our years; they are gone as the days are gone, and the bare branches silently speak of a new year, slowly advancing to its buds, its foliage, and fruit. Deciduous trees associate with human life as this yew never can. Clothed in its yellowish-green needles, its tarnished green, it knows no hope or sorrow; it is indifferent to winter, and does not look forward to summer. With their annual loss of leaves, and renewal, oak and elm and ash and beech seem to stand by us and to share our thoughts.
228 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1884
17 people are currently reading
105 people want to read
About the author
Richard Jefferies
367 books58 followers(John) Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) is best known for his prolific and sensitive writing on natural history, rural life and agriculture in late Victorian England. However, a closer examination of his career reveals a many-sided author who was something of an enigma. To some people he is more familiar as the author of the children’s classic Bevis or the strange futuristic fantasy After London, while he also has some reputation as a mystic worthy of serious study. Since his death his books have enjoyed intermittent spells of popularity, but today he is unknown to the greater part of the reading public. Jefferies, however, has been an inspiration to a number of more prominent writers and W.H. Hudson, Edward Thomas, Henry Williamson and John Fowles are among those who have acknowledged their debt to him. In my view his greatest achievement lies in his expression, aesthetically and spiritually, of the human encounter with the natural world – something that became almost an obsession for him in his last years.
He was born at Coate in the north Wiltshire countryside - now on the outskirts of Swindon - where his family farmed a smallholding of about forty acres. His father was a thoughtful man with a passionate love of nature but was unsuccessful as a farmer, with the result that the later years of Jefferies' childhood were spent in a household increasingly threatened by poverty. There were also, it seems, other tensions in the family. Richard’s mother, who had been brought up in London, never settled into a life in the country and the portrait of her as Mrs Iden - usually regarded as an accurate one - in his last novel, Amaryllis at the Fair, is anything but flattering. Remarks made in some of Jefferies’ childhood letters to his aunt also strongly suggest an absence of mutual affection and understanding between mother and son. A combination of an unsettled home life and an early romantic desire for adventure led him at the age of sixteen to leave home with the intention of traversing Europe as far as Moscow. In this escapade he was accompanied by a cousin, but the journey was abandoned soon after they reached France. On their return to England they attempted to board a ship for the United States but this plan also came to nothing when they found themselves without sufficient money to pay for food.
A self-absorbed and independent youth, Jefferies spent much of his time walking through the countryside around Coate and along the wide chalk expanses of the Marlborough Downs. He regularly visited Burderop woods and Liddington Hill near his home and on longer trips explored Savernake Forest and the stretch of the downs to the east, where the famous white horse is engraved in the hillside above Uffington. His favourite haunt was Liddington Hill, a height crowned with an ancient fort commanding superb views of the north Wiltshire plain and the downs. It was on the summit of Liddington at the age of about eighteen, as he relates in The Story of My Heart, that his unusual sensitivity to nature began to induce in him a powerful inner awakening - a desire for a larger existence or reality which he termed 'soul life'. Wherever he went in the countryside he found himself in awe of the beauty and tranquility of the natural world; not only the trees, flowers and animals, but also the sun, the stars and the entire cosmos seemed to him to be filled with an inexpressible sense of magic and meaning.
He was born at Coate in the north Wiltshire countryside - now on the outskirts of Swindon - where his family farmed a smallholding of about forty acres. His father was a thoughtful man with a passionate love of nature but was unsuccessful as a farmer, with the result that the later years of Jefferies' childhood were spent in a household increasingly threatened by poverty. There were also, it seems, other tensions in the family. Richard’s mother, who had been brought up in London, never settled into a life in the country and the portrait of her as Mrs Iden - usually regarded as an accurate one - in his last novel, Amaryllis at the Fair, is anything but flattering. Remarks made in some of Jefferies’ childhood letters to his aunt also strongly suggest an absence of mutual affection and understanding between mother and son. A combination of an unsettled home life and an early romantic desire for adventure led him at the age of sixteen to leave home with the intention of traversing Europe as far as Moscow. In this escapade he was accompanied by a cousin, but the journey was abandoned soon after they reached France. On their return to England they attempted to board a ship for the United States but this plan also came to nothing when they found themselves without sufficient money to pay for food.
A self-absorbed and independent youth, Jefferies spent much of his time walking through the countryside around Coate and along the wide chalk expanses of the Marlborough Downs. He regularly visited Burderop woods and Liddington Hill near his home and on longer trips explored Savernake Forest and the stretch of the downs to the east, where the famous white horse is engraved in the hillside above Uffington. His favourite haunt was Liddington Hill, a height crowned with an ancient fort commanding superb views of the north Wiltshire plain and the downs. It was on the summit of Liddington at the age of about eighteen, as he relates in The Story of My Heart, that his unusual sensitivity to nature began to induce in him a powerful inner awakening - a desire for a larger existence or reality which he termed 'soul life'. Wherever he went in the countryside he found himself in awe of the beauty and tranquility of the natural world; not only the trees, flowers and animals, but also the sun, the stars and the entire cosmos seemed to him to be filled with an inexpressible sense of magic and meaning.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 23, 2020
Annie Dillard must have read Jefferies; some of his essays vibrate with the same intensity of the feeling of nature when you give yourself over to it, when you still as much as possible and absorb it. Some of his writing is just plain descriptions of what he sees while reposing on a field, and are missing the magic that I captured below; he also muses on country people, reading, farming, hunting, etc. that was hard to read.
Just this afternoon, I was sitting by a pine throwing the frisbee for my dog, and in the heat, he takes a lot of breaks, and to pass the time, I picked up discarded needles from the pine, and played with them, breaking them from their bunches of three to separate ones, trying to create a furled ribbon by peeling them, trying to find a anomalous one, a bunch of four, say; I never did, but that time now feels so relaxed and holy, like I was in a trance, feeling the cool grass on my back, the warm sun, the shade of the tree, the breeze, the tangible world of the tree in my hands. Jefferies understands this feeling, this work of being in the world, of seeing and touching the world.
As the wind, wandering over the sea, takes from each wave an invisible portion, and brings to those on shore the ethereal essence of ocean, so the air lingering among the woods and hedges—green waves and billows—became full of fine atoms of summer.
The dust of the sunshine was borne along and breathed, steeped in flower and pollen to the music of bees and birds, the stream of the atmosphere became a living thing. It was life to breathe it, for the air itself was life. The strength of the earth went up through the leaves into the wind. Fed thus on the food of the Immortals, the heart opened to the width and depth of the summer—to the broad horizon afar, down to the minutest creature in the grass, up to the highest swallow.
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.
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.
My heart is fixed firm and stable in the belief that ultimately the sunshine and the summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it were, interwoven into man's existence. He shall take from all their beauty and enjoy their glory.
He is indeed despicable who cannot look onwards to the ideal life of man. Not to do so is to deny our birthright of mind.
The sound of summer is everywhere—in the passing breeze, in the hedge, in the broad branching trees, in the grass as it swings; all the myriad particles that together make the summer are in motion. The sap moves in the trees, the pollen is pushed out from grass and flower, and yet again these acres and acres of leaves and square miles of grass blades—for they would cover acres and square miles if reckoned edge to edge—are drawing their strength from the atmosphere. Exceedingly minute as these vibrations must be, their numbers perhaps may give them a volume almost reaching in the aggregate to the power of the ear.
The fervour of the sunbeams descending in a tidal flood rings on the strung harp of earth. It is this exquisite undertone, heard and yet unheard, which brings the mind into sweet accordance with the wonderful instrument of nature.
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!
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.
It is nothing to the green-finches; all their thoughts are in their song-talk. The sunny moment is to them all in all. So deeply are they rapt in it that they do not know whether it is a moment or a year. There is no clock for feeling, for joy, for love.
And with all their motions and stepping from bough to bough, they are not restless; they have so much time, you see. The flowers open, and remain open for hours, to the sun. Hastelessness is the only word one can make up to describe it; there is much rest, but no haste. Each moment, as with the greenfinches, is so full of life that it seems so long and so sufficient in itself. Not only the days, but life itself lengthens in summer. I would spread abroad my arms and gather more of it to me, could I do so.
Straight go the white petals to the heart; straight the mind's glance goes back to how many other pageants of summer in old times.
Let not the eyes grow dim, look not back but forward; the soul must uphold itself like the sun. Let us labour to make the heart grow larger as we become older, as the spreading oak gives more shelter. That we could but take to the soul some of the greatness and the beauty of the summer!
I cannot leave it; I must stay under the old tree in the midst of the long grass, the luxury of the leaves, and the song in the very air. I seem as if I could feel all the glowing life the sunshine gives and the south wind calls to being.
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.
These are the only hours that are not wasted—these hours that absorb the soul and fill it with beauty. This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance.
To be beautiful and to be calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of nature. If I cannot achieve it, at least I can think it.
The white dust heated by sunshine, the green hedges, and the heavily masses trees, and the silence. Such solace and solitude cannot be painted; the trees cannot be placed far away enough in perspective. It is necessary to stand in it like the oaks to know it. And the silence is the silence of fields. If a breeze rustled the boughs, if a greenfinch called, if a mare in the meadow shook herself, these were not sounds, but the silence itself. So sensitive to it as I was, in its turn it held me firmly, like the fabled spells of old time. The mere touch of a leaf was a talisman to bring me under the enchantment, so that I seemd to feel and know all that was proceeding among the grass-blades and in the bushes.
I can never read or write in summer out-of-doors. Only now and then, determined to write down this mystery and delicious sense while in it, I have brought ink and paper…three words, and where is the thought? Gone. The paper is so obviously paper, the ink so evidently ink. You want colour, flexibility, light, sweet low sound- all these to paint it and play it in music, at the same time you want something that will answer to and record in one touch the strong throb of life and the thought, or feeling, or whatever it is that goes out into the earth and sky and space, endless as a beam of light.
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.
Just this afternoon, I was sitting by a pine throwing the frisbee for my dog, and in the heat, he takes a lot of breaks, and to pass the time, I picked up discarded needles from the pine, and played with them, breaking them from their bunches of three to separate ones, trying to create a furled ribbon by peeling them, trying to find a anomalous one, a bunch of four, say; I never did, but that time now feels so relaxed and holy, like I was in a trance, feeling the cool grass on my back, the warm sun, the shade of the tree, the breeze, the tangible world of the tree in my hands. Jefferies understands this feeling, this work of being in the world, of seeing and touching the world.
As the wind, wandering over the sea, takes from each wave an invisible portion, and brings to those on shore the ethereal essence of ocean, so the air lingering among the woods and hedges—green waves and billows—became full of fine atoms of summer.
The dust of the sunshine was borne along and breathed, steeped in flower and pollen to the music of bees and birds, the stream of the atmosphere became a living thing. It was life to breathe it, for the air itself was life. The strength of the earth went up through the leaves into the wind. Fed thus on the food of the Immortals, the heart opened to the width and depth of the summer—to the broad horizon afar, down to the minutest creature in the grass, up to the highest swallow.
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.
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.
My heart is fixed firm and stable in the belief that ultimately the sunshine and the summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it were, interwoven into man's existence. He shall take from all their beauty and enjoy their glory.
He is indeed despicable who cannot look onwards to the ideal life of man. Not to do so is to deny our birthright of mind.
The sound of summer is everywhere—in the passing breeze, in the hedge, in the broad branching trees, in the grass as it swings; all the myriad particles that together make the summer are in motion. The sap moves in the trees, the pollen is pushed out from grass and flower, and yet again these acres and acres of leaves and square miles of grass blades—for they would cover acres and square miles if reckoned edge to edge—are drawing their strength from the atmosphere. Exceedingly minute as these vibrations must be, their numbers perhaps may give them a volume almost reaching in the aggregate to the power of the ear.
The fervour of the sunbeams descending in a tidal flood rings on the strung harp of earth. It is this exquisite undertone, heard and yet unheard, which brings the mind into sweet accordance with the wonderful instrument of nature.
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!
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.
It is nothing to the green-finches; all their thoughts are in their song-talk. The sunny moment is to them all in all. So deeply are they rapt in it that they do not know whether it is a moment or a year. There is no clock for feeling, for joy, for love.
And with all their motions and stepping from bough to bough, they are not restless; they have so much time, you see. The flowers open, and remain open for hours, to the sun. Hastelessness is the only word one can make up to describe it; there is much rest, but no haste. Each moment, as with the greenfinches, is so full of life that it seems so long and so sufficient in itself. Not only the days, but life itself lengthens in summer. I would spread abroad my arms and gather more of it to me, could I do so.
Straight go the white petals to the heart; straight the mind's glance goes back to how many other pageants of summer in old times.
Let not the eyes grow dim, look not back but forward; the soul must uphold itself like the sun. Let us labour to make the heart grow larger as we become older, as the spreading oak gives more shelter. That we could but take to the soul some of the greatness and the beauty of the summer!
I cannot leave it; I must stay under the old tree in the midst of the long grass, the luxury of the leaves, and the song in the very air. I seem as if I could feel all the glowing life the sunshine gives and the south wind calls to being.
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.
These are the only hours that are not wasted—these hours that absorb the soul and fill it with beauty. This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance.
To be beautiful and to be calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of nature. If I cannot achieve it, at least I can think it.
The white dust heated by sunshine, the green hedges, and the heavily masses trees, and the silence. Such solace and solitude cannot be painted; the trees cannot be placed far away enough in perspective. It is necessary to stand in it like the oaks to know it. And the silence is the silence of fields. If a breeze rustled the boughs, if a greenfinch called, if a mare in the meadow shook herself, these were not sounds, but the silence itself. So sensitive to it as I was, in its turn it held me firmly, like the fabled spells of old time. The mere touch of a leaf was a talisman to bring me under the enchantment, so that I seemd to feel and know all that was proceeding among the grass-blades and in the bushes.
I can never read or write in summer out-of-doors. Only now and then, determined to write down this mystery and delicious sense while in it, I have brought ink and paper…three words, and where is the thought? Gone. The paper is so obviously paper, the ink so evidently ink. You want colour, flexibility, light, sweet low sound- all these to paint it and play it in music, at the same time you want something that will answer to and record in one touch the strong throb of life and the thought, or feeling, or whatever it is that goes out into the earth and sky and space, endless as a beam of light.
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.
March 30, 2025
The writing is fabulous and wonderful but this is not a very nicely produced book. For example the titles are too close to the top edge of the page. The illustrations are pleasant but do not belong with this text. As the writing is so much about description and the impossibility of quite articulating vision, it is probably a bad idea to have illustrations at all.
I would like to reread these in another edition and to check that there have not been selections made.
It fascinates me to imagine the appeal of this book for Joan.
It is very sad to read about the number of birds, plants and insects he saw.
I would like to reread these in another edition and to check that there have not been selections made.
It fascinates me to imagine the appeal of this book for Joan.
It is very sad to read about the number of birds, plants and insects he saw.
May 13, 2020
This book is wonderful and lyrical and poetic about the countryside in a way I love. Quite dense and sadly got shelved while my brain couldn't handle but glad I've finished and can pass along to someone else
July 8, 2015
The Life of the Fields is a collection of Richard Jefferies ebullient reflections on nature and the countryside, in England, in the late 1800s, (and a bit more besides). I couldn't imagine anyone writing more joyously about a simple experience as a walk in a country field. This seems at odds with his life long poor health, TB and a chronic anal fissure - Ouch! He died at the young age of 38.
Born on a small farm and raised in the countryside, in North Wiltshire, now near the modern sprawl of Swindon, it's clear he had picked up considerable knowledge of the English countryside, rural-ways and, especially, nature in the wild during his youth.
He was also a prolific writer; here the essays comprise observational prose poems, vignettes on the ways and habits of country-folk, of man’s influence and impact on the countryside and wildlife (the rural sports, specifically trout fishing and pheasant shooting, intent on the eradication and leading to the decimation of preying species, such as otters, kites, buzzards, and pine martens. Though it's interesting how numbers of most of these have increased since his time with conservation measures and changing times).
In the final few essays, he turns his thoughts to London, its light and environment, before considering Paris, its street planning and architecture, and well and truly writing it off.
Born on a small farm and raised in the countryside, in North Wiltshire, now near the modern sprawl of Swindon, it's clear he had picked up considerable knowledge of the English countryside, rural-ways and, especially, nature in the wild during his youth.
He was also a prolific writer; here the essays comprise observational prose poems, vignettes on the ways and habits of country-folk, of man’s influence and impact on the countryside and wildlife (the rural sports, specifically trout fishing and pheasant shooting, intent on the eradication and leading to the decimation of preying species, such as otters, kites, buzzards, and pine martens. Though it's interesting how numbers of most of these have increased since his time with conservation measures and changing times).
In the final few essays, he turns his thoughts to London, its light and environment, before considering Paris, its street planning and architecture, and well and truly writing it off.
August 3, 2016
The Legend of A Gate from, "The Life of the Fields", is a pretty typical story from this time period. Two people separated for a time, a disaster, and the appearing of a spirit or ghost. Not a lot new in this story.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews