2 quotations linked to Field and Hedgerow by or associated with Richard Jefferies, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Seasonal time, memory, mortality, nature, observation, work and the passage from one natural cycle to another.
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“I think of the drift of time”
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.
Source note: 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.
“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.
Source note: 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.