ALWAYS excepting the committee that concocted the King James' Bible, none of my favourite authors produced more passages that I hold dear than the Victorian nature writer, Richard Jefferies.

Perhaps because, in my formative years, I walked daily up and down a country lane, unconsciously learning to love sights like the patterns of sun and shadow chasing along a hillside, I treasure Jefferies' answer to a friend who asked him why he always trod the same path:

"I want the same old loved things, the same wild flowers, the same trees; the blackbirds, the coloured yellow-hammer sing, sing, singing as long as there is light... Let me hear the humble bees, and stay to look down on the rich dandelion disk... all the living staircase of spring, step by step, upwards to the great gallery of summer. Let me watch the same succession year by year. Let me see the very thistles open their great crowns. I should miss the thistles.''

And, without Jefferies, I would miss this: "All of you with little children, take them somehow into the country among green grass and yellow wheat, among trees, by hills and streams, if you wish their highest education, that of the heart and soul, to be completed.... Give them the freedom of the meadows. Do it at any cost or trouble to yourself, if you wish them to become great men and noble women''.

Long experience of rural England has taught me that the "freedom of the meadows'' offers no guarantee of finer feelings. But the passage still grips through its passionate intensity. And it was Jefferies who, in a single short sentence, captured the essence of the countryside: "The wheat is beautiful, but human life is labour''.

A week ago I highlighted Jefferies' essay on a wild trout which he protected for three summers. If his concern for wildlife strikes a contemporary note, listen as it deepens: "I believe that the earth in one year produces enough food to last for 30. Why then do we not have enough? Why do people die of starvation... Food and drink, roof and clothes, are the inalienable right of every child born. If the world does not provide it then the world is mad... Probably the whole mode of thought of the nations must be altered before progress is possible''.

The Nature-worship Jefferies' advocated is not the answer. And yet, most telling today, he warned against the blind arrogance by which we cast ourselves as lords of creation, free to do with our planet, and indeed the universe, as we wish.

He wrote: "Sitting indoors with every modern luxury around, rich carpets, pictures, food and drink brought from the uttermost ends of the earth, with the telegraph, the printing press and the railway at immediate command, it is easy to say: 'What have I to do with all this (Nature)... I am apart from the other inhabitants of the earth'. But go to the window. See - there is but a thin transparent sheet of brittle glass between the artificial man and the air, the light, the trees and grass. Between him and those irresistible laws which keep the sun upon its course there is absolutely no bar whatsoever.''

Ignoring that message will one day bring our doom, probably already well on its way.