This volume contains a wonderful collection of essays written by John Jeffries. John Richard Jefferies (1848 - 1887) was a famous English nature writer, most remembered for his masterful depictions of English rural life. The essays include: The Pageant of Summer, The Field Play, Uptill-a-Thorn, Rural Dynamite, Bits of Oak Bark, The Acorn-Gatherer, The Legends of a Gateway, A Roman Brook, Meadow Thoughts, Clematis Lane, Nature Near Brighton, and more. Many vintage texts such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this book now, in an...

Richard Jefferies (1848 1887) remains one of the most thoughtful and most lyrical writers on the English countryside. He had aspirations to make a living as a novelist, but it was his short, factually based articles for The Live Stock Journal and other magazines, drawn from a wealth of knowledge of the rural community into which he had been born, which, when brought together in book form, brought him recognition (though not wealth) and which continued to be read and admired after his early death. This volume, first published in 1884, contains a collection of essays and articles previously...

Immersed in the detail of this ancient landscape, its people and the habitats of its wildlife, what emerges from Jefferies' dazzling prose is his sense of perpetual wonder and the deep affection he felt for his homeland, from the clatter of a milkmaid's boots to a pike lying in ambush.

"Having drunk deeply of the heaven above and felt the most glorious beauty of the day, and remembering the old, old, sea, which (as it seemed to me) 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." Richard Jefferies' masterpiece of prose-poetry expresses his sublime yearning not just for...