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,