Richard Jefferies & William Henry Hudson

Odd it is that these two men lie in this crowded cemetery at Broadwater and not in a churchyard, for they loved the quiet ways.

 

To them the music of the birds was more than the strains of the finest orchestra. The shy wild things of wood and held were their friends. It seemed as if the rustling leaves of the trees, the nodding petals of wild flowers, whispered to them their secrets, and the wish and ability that Richard Jefferies and William Henry Hudson had in common was to make all the world share their happy knowledge.

Of Jefferies, who was born the earlier, it might be said that he was the first English writer to spend a lifetime in turning the life of the countryside into a prose poem. Essays and stories were devoted to the same purpose, and thousands of readers who would before have passed such things by looked on them with new eyes, and found in them an unsuspected loveliness.

 

He wrote in sickness and in health, and we could say of him that his life's work was its own reward, though we should add that numberless writers since have gained inspiration from him.

W. H. Hudson was no imitator, though he loved the life of the open air and sky as Jefferies did. His writings took a wider scope, for to the English scene he added visions of delight in South America, where, born near Buenos Aires in 1841, he spent the first 30 years of his life. His mother encouraged him as a boy to study every small natural happening round him, and in his writings he passes on to us the thrill of the unknown and the greater thrill of the discoverer.

He came to England and started writing of the land he had left behind him, The Purple Land that England Lost, he calls it in one of his titles, and there followed several books on the natural history of South America. But all the time he was looking round him and discovering England, especially her birds. His letters were as full of news of birds as of his family and friends.

He was poor most of his days, for at first his books did not sell well, though his writing was fresh and vivid and often of great scientific value. Today his Green Mansions is acclaimed a classic, one of the most thrilling and dramatic romances in our literature, with Rima as its central character, a Rima very different from Epstein's miserable conception of her on the memorial to Hudson in Hyde Park.

He died in 1922, and was brought to lie here beside the wife who had passed on before him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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