The Form remains, the Function never dies;
    While we, the brave, the mighty and the wise,
    We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
    The elements, must vanish:—­be it so! 
    Enough, if something from our hands have power
    To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
    And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
    Through love, through hope, and faith’s transcendent dower,
    We feel that we are greater than we know.

Richard Jefferies is closely akin to Wordsworth in his overpowering consciousness of the life in nature.  This consciousness is the strongest force in him, so that at times he is almost submerged by it, and he loses the sense of outward things.  In this condition of trance the sense of time vanishes, there is, he asserts, no such thing, no past or future, only now, which is eternity.  In The Story of my Heart, a rhapsody of mystic experience and aspiration he describes in detail several such moments of exaltation or trance.  He seems to be peculiarly sensitive to sunshine.  As the moon typifies to Keats the eternal essence in all things, so to Jefferies the sun seems to be the physical expression or symbol of the central Force of the world, and it is through gazing on sunlight that he most often enters into the trance state.

Standing, one summer’s morning, in a recess on London Bridge, he looks out on the sunshine “burning on steadfast,” “lighting the great heaven; gleaming on my finger-nail.”

“I was intensely conscious of it,” he writes, “I felt it; I felt the presence of the immense powers of the universe; I felt out into the depths of the ether.  So intensely conscious of the sun, the sky, the limitless space, I felt too in the midst of eternity then, in the midst of the supernatural, among the immortal, and the greatness of the material realised the spirit.  By these I saw my soul; by these I knew the supernatural to be more intensely real than the sun.  I touched the supernatural, the immortal, there that moment."[23]

When he reaches this state, outer things drop away,[24] and he seems to become lost, and absorbed into the being of the universe.  He partakes, momentarily, of a larger, fuller life, he drinks in vitality through nature.  The least blade of grass, he says, or the greatest oak, “seemed like exterior nerves and veins for the conveyance of feeling to me.  Sometimes a very ecstasy of exquisite enjoyment of the entire visible universe filled me."[25]

This great central Life Force, which Jefferies, like Wordsworth, seemed at moments to touch, he, in marked contrast to other mystics, refuses to call God.  For, he says, what we understand by deity is the purest form of mind, and he sees no mind in nature.  It is a force without a mind, “more subtle than electricity, but absolutely devoid of consciousness and with no more feeling than the force which lifts the tides."[26] Yet this cannot content him, for later he declares there must be an existence higher than deity, towards which he aspires and presses with the whole force of his being.  “Give me,” he cries, “to live the deepest soul-life now and always with this ‘Highest Soul.’"[27]