Seasonal change prompts Jefferies to experience time as movement visible in buds, flowers and remembered observation, linking temporal awareness to close attention to the natural world.
Field and Hedgerow, in the essay “Hours of Spring”; Project Gutenberg #7030. The book was collected posthumously by Jefferies’s widow, so individual essays may predate the 1889 volume.
“It is eternity now.”
Jefferies collapses ordinary chronological distinctions into an intensely experienced present, describing the current moment as participation in eternity rather than a point merely passing toward the future.
The Story of My Heart (1883), Chapter III, Project Gutenberg #2317. The inherited Chapter I note is corrected: ‘It is eternity now’ occurs in Jefferies’s tumulus meditation after he writes that, recognising his inner consciousness / psyche, he cannot understand time. It is speculative spiritual autobiography and metaphysical-poetic reflection, not a scientific theory of time, physics or consciousness.
“Now is eternity; now is the immortal life.”
The repeated ‘now’ intensifies Jefferies’s claim that spiritual significance is experienced in the present rather than postponed to a distant future or afterlife.
The Story of My Heart (1883), Chapter III, Project Gutenberg #2317. The inherited Chapter I note is corrected: ‘Now is eternity; now is the immortal life’ immediately follows the same tumulus passage in which Jefferies treats the present moment as continuous eternity. This is his personal metaphysical/spiritual intuition, not empirical evidence for immortality, neuroscience or clinical guidance.
“Márgarét, áre you gríeving Over Goldengrove unleaving?”
Hopkins begins with a child grieving autumn leaves and gradually widens that feeling into a meditation on human awareness of loss, change and mortality.
“Spring and Fall: to a young child,” written in 1880 and published posthumously in 1918, represented by Poetry Foundation. Margaret is the poem’s addressed child; the meditation is literary and theological rather than a clinical account of grief development.
“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”
Mortality cannot be eliminated, so the practical answer is to make conscious use of the finite span between beginning and end.
Soliloquies in England, “War Shrines”; the sentence follows a contrast between strained worldliness and a more festive acceptance of life.
“You will see that you have fewer years to your credit than you count.”
Calendar age can overstate the amount of life a person has actually directed for themselves when large portions were lost to distraction and obligation.
On the Shortness of Life, Chapter III; Seneca’s imagined reckoning of an older person’s years.
“The gap of time since I had seen him last had made no impression on me”
Jefferies describes memory resisting elapsed time: the remembered person remains vivid even though years have passed and death has created an irreversible break in the present.
Field and Hedgerow; Project Gutenberg #7030. The sentence occurs in a recollection of John Brown after his death and is kept in that personal-memory context rather than generalized into abstract grief advice.
