Richard Jefferies has discovered what most of us know: that bright sunlight can “put out” the book brought outdoors just as sunlight through windows had seemingly extinguished a hearth fire indoors.

“So here in the shadow of the American crab tree the light of the sky put out the written pages,” the Victorian naturalist reports in the Life of the Fields (1884).

“This beautiful and wonderful light excited a sense of some likewise beautiful and wonderful truth, some unknown but grand thought hovering as a swallow above. The swallows hovered and did not alight, but they were above.

“An inexpressible thought quivered in the azure overhead; it could not be fully grasped, but there was a sense and feeling of its presence. Before that mere sense of its presence the weak and feeble pages, the small fires of human knowledge, dwindled and lost meaning. There was something here that was not in the books.”

We do not find that something. “The very grass-blades confounded the wisest, the tender lime leaf put them to shame, the grasshopper derided them, the sparrow on the wall chirped his scorn. The books were put out, unless a screen were placed between them and the light of the sky.”