,frontispiece3 ,the ,forest ,giant ,illustration3 ,title page ,the ,forest ,giant by ,,adrien ,,le ,,corbeau ,translated from the ,french by ,j4 ,h4 ,,ross ,jonathan ,cape ,,eleven ,,gower ,,street ,,london ,,first ,,published ,,in ,,mcmxxiv ,,made ,,printed ,,in ,,great ,,britain ,,by ,,butler ,,tanner ,,ltd4 ,,frome ,,and ,,london ,contents ,,chap4 #a ,,the ,,odyssey #b ,,the ,,genus ,,trembles ,,into ,,consciousness #c ,,the ,,kindly ,,darkness #d ,,contrasts ,,which ,,are ,,not ,,contrasts #e ,,caught ,,up ,,into ,,the ,,stream ,,of ,,life #f ,,the ,,law ,,of ,,balance #g ,,metamorphoses #h ,,what ,,the ,,moon ,,saw #i ,,when ,,the ,,corselet ,,snaps #aj ,,the ,,mirror ,,of ,,changeless ,,time #aa ,,the ,,wheel ,,of ,,life ,,lived #ab ,,when ,,the ,,wood-,,dust ,,floated ,,in ,,the ,,air #ac ,,what ,,is ,,called ,,death #ad ,,the ,,theory ,,of ,,eternal ,,sleeplessness ,,conclusion3 ,,within ,a ,,cell ,,chapter ,i ,the ,odyssey ,for years on end it had been rolling1 across the plains1 through the deep meadow grasses1 under the dim echoing archways of the forest4 ,always1 in heat and cold1 beneath blue skies1 or skies clouded with rain and hail and snow1 it had been rolling ceaselessly4 ,one day it would be gilded by the sunlight--but not softened2 another day grizzled streaks of rain soaked it--without refreshment4 ,it was buried1 to all appearances for ever1 by drifts of snow--but was not hurt4 ,it had crossed cataracts of light and floods of shadow2 it had been rocked by soft winds and hurled dizzily into the air by the shrieking gusts of cyclones2 and it had met all these things--the sweetness of the day1 the shade of night1 the winters1 the springs1 the summers--with the same submissive1 invulnerable apathy4 ,it had waited its hour1 ready1 if need be1 to wait yet much longer4 ,those who boast of their travels and adventures should think over this journey and its conditions4 ,we have glimpses of other countries1 we climb mountains1 we run through woods and fields2 but our varieties and difficulties are as nothing to the differences of its varied blades of grass1 to its dark holes in the ground1 its mounds of earth or snow1 to all the obstacles which it met and overcame or slipped past on its road4 ,our gallops on shore or voyages at sea do not compare with its mad career as the sport of storms and mountain-torrents4 ,time and space fought over the little helpless rolling body4 ,the elements loosed out their terrors round it like an evil dream1 seeming to toss it about in prize4 ,everything seemed to toss it about4 ,it was girt round by immensities1 which might be azure or glittering with gold in summer1 pallid dull or menacing in winter1 silent as the abyss by night1 and terrible with a myriad of unknown noises in the day2 but nothing daunted it4 ,within its tiny form it held other visions1 greater yet1 visions and million-old memories of the childhood of the world1 when the waves moaned in another measure1 and the agony of the vision of earth was different4 ,so it waited the favourable event which would give it life3 or the sign of dissolution1 to presage its death4 ,the light beating of a bird's wings1 one dawn1 had began its career by flinging it out of the tiny shelter 7a crevice in a low branch of the mother-tree7 from which the mightiest winds had been unable in long years to tear it4 ,it was falling in slow gyrations through the green air1 across the red-barred dawn-fires of the sun1 when a quick breath of wind lifted its mossy form and carried it1 from near the ground1 far out into space4 ,in its flight it grazed1 time and again1 the rude bark of trees1 sank to ground level1 skimmed it1 and rose once more before it fell at last upon the polished surface of a stone1 where it lay till dark and through the night till the next noon4 ,the air above it was heavy with the humming of insects1 and around stretched the very old forest1 vibrant with life4 ,the merest trifle might have carried this tiny seed of ,californian pine a few inches farther1 where lay fat moist soil1 good for tree-growth2 but such was not its lot4 ,the vast and shining ,,eye which oversees the dizzy spectacle of the universe1 and comprehends it in its dreadful whole as in its least bewildering detail1 this ,,eye had doubtless not lost sight of it4 ,suddenly all light around was blotted out3 a great mass overwhelmed it and carried it away with heavy abrupt movements4 ,it felt itself embedded in a soft warm substance1 among grains of sand1 dead leaves and grass1 which were picked up now and then from the ground1 carried awhile1 and dropped 7only to be replaced by others71 in a sequence of rudely rhythmical movement4 ,the pine-seed had been caught up in the frog of an animal's foot1 fixed in it deeply1 so that it was not till after many days at last delivered1 when the beast waded across a brook and left the seed on a dry sand-bank1 near sunset1 in the deep glow of the evening rays4 ,the seed had now quitted the forest for an immense1 bare1 open desert1 a new prospect of the world4 ,here were no rustling grasses nor fluttering leaves1 no clashing together of dry branches1 no birds to sing nor beasts to howl3 none of that rich1 wide1 strange stirring of the mighty jungle1 whose breathing and mysterious rumour was choked 7like the cries of its animals and the laboured thrumming of the winds through its vaulted trees7 by the rank smell of sap and the exhalations of dead leaves and teeming soil4 ,a light wind blew the seed across the sand1 for hours driving it about1 backwards1 forwards1 to right or left1 sometimes in great circles1 and sometimes stationary against a stone till a new gust should send it forth again1 past its obstacle1 on yet another abandoned desultory course4 ,the world was overspread with an intense blue1 from which light seemed to fall in sheets4 ,later this brilliant blue turned to a bleeding red1 through which the sun's golden arrows slid into violet bands and faded gently4 ,an exquisite freshness fell from heaven as the purple mildness of evening came down upon the world4 ,yet the pine-seed could not rest4 ,the wind1 as it became sweeter1 became stronger1 and sent it again across the sand-spaces of its former road1 while about it a new life began to stir4 ,insects which had been hiding all day danced over it1 or circled violently about it1 or stopped to smell it1 or tried in vain to crack open its hard shell4 ,their grotesque shadows ran blackly over the silver sand4 ,at times green shining specks came near1 hovered a moment1 and vanished in a soft shiver of wings4 ,all the while the pine-seed resigned itself with unconquerable patience to its senseless course4 ,dawn came4 ,the sun climbed high in the heavens4 ,yesterday's burning blue again hemmed in the world2 and after it came night and dawn1 and day and night again once more4 ,in the same wide desert the pine-seed rolled about1 the sport of the same winds1 pitting against their caprice the constant apathetic endurance of its little1 round1 hard body4 ,so weeks and months flowed by1 times which for other things or other beings elsewhere may have been momentous2 but which for the sequoia seed were all alike4 ,then one day the sky darkened1 and rain began to fall4 ,the first slow heavy drops seemed to nail the seed to the sand1 and whole days passed2 but in the end1 just at twilight1 water began to trickle over the ground and to collect in plashes here and there over the huge sandy surface4 ,the strange power of water to absorb light enables it to preserve the clearness of the daylight1 even when the light has fled1 and makes the shadows which it reflects in the darkness appear even darker than their truth4 ,the sea gives1 better than any other thing1 a feeling of the mystery of never-ending distances4 ,it strikes not merely on living beings1 through their imagination1 their blood1 their nerves1 but seems almost to project itself into materials4 ,these water-plashes at last ran together into little streams which carried off in their current everything not strong enough to resist them4 ,consequently the pine-seed found itself all at once flooded with freshness4 ,the liquid got right into it1 penetrated unreservedly into its outer husk1 till the little seed felt itself soaked4 ,none the less it kept its vital force intact1 and neither split nor sprouted4 ,the life-force handed down to it through millions of generations was too vigorous and too well-prepared for its special future1 whether near or distant1 to break up in the tiny frame4 ,only this time inertia was not its sole defence against the assailing elements3 it found in itself a happy elasticity which helped to keep out surplus liquid4 ,thus for the whole rainy season the seed wandered about the sand-desert1 going with the waters down an imperceptible slope4 ,on all sides the waves now compassed it1 with the grey sky coving above it and them in the daytime2 but at night it was drowned by water and by darkness4 ,the waters1 as ever1 darkened the shadows of these shades circling in space4 ,a chill1 blind1 impenetrable horror overcame the pine-seed4 ,it appeared1 almost like an endowed being1 to hesitate in its career4 ,it struck against stones1 seemed to cling to the tufts of grass which the waters carried down with them1 seemed to betray a longing to stop1 while the waves1 so infinitely great1 withdrew it gently but irresistibly from every obstacle4 ,it yielded patiently1 strong perhaps in its sense of future greatness4 ,the outside forces1 despite their violence1 could not prevail over the insignificant seed whose giant bulk would some day laugh at the roaring of the winds and the struggles of the waves2 and as it was tossed about during the night in the immensity of shadow and water1 may not the sense of past existence have come to life in it1 and a memory of that other chaos with the very different terrors1 as experienced by its forbears in the first stages of the world8 ,so it journeyed1 firmly and humbly1 towards the unknown4 ,,chapter #b ,the ,genus trembles into ,consciousness ,one day the stream of water by which the seed was carried along sank suddenly--whirling down a funnel in the ground4 ,slowly the grey light of day grew less as the seed dived deeper and deeper1 till in absolute darkness it was rushing madly down the water-spout4 ,hoarse bellowings resounded about its long subterranean voyage1 asserting themselves above the stifled noises of the passage of the buried river through the bowels of the earth4 ,for weeks and months the pine-kernel revolved in these invisible currents1 at times slipping slowly along the twisting flow1 at other times hurled forward at a dizzy speed in the dwelling coolness of the under-ground4 ,suddenly the booming of the flood deepened4 ,a hesitating cautious light came trembling down the waves1 and with a huge guggling the seed found itself thrown out into a greenish mass of translucent water1 the volume of a river which now took charge of its further course1 and in whose stream it long drifted1 while the sun gilded the changing surface or the moon turned it all to silver4 ,the tiny seed seemed lost in time1 swallowed up in space1 as it floated on top of the water or sank into its depth4 ,the contrasts were overwhelming1 when the insignificant grain was set beside the river which carried it along1 beside the wide champaigns of the two banks1 beside the unplumbed void above1 in whose pale-blue transparency some far grey and white clouds were fading or floating4 ,how small it looked so set in infinite space6 and yet the pine-kernel had its own part to play1 and of the thousands of interacting forces in earth and heaven some were specially appointed to fulfil its destiny4 ,where did it go in this great smooth-running river8 ,how was it that the immensities among which it wandered did not blot out its faint existence8 ,had the all-seeing ,eye really appointed each one of the many incidents which marked its start in life8 ,can we1 in view of this case1 believe that everything has been fore-ordained since the beginning of time 7which has never been71 and is ordained to the end of time 7which also will never be78 ,no doubt there are the same laws for beings and for things1 for constellations of dazzling size as for atoms too small to see1 laws which operate in a like spirit and entail like inevitable consequences of related sense4 ,worlds and beings1 objective things and abstractions of thought and instinct all run a similar course of birth1 climax1 and decline4 ,they begin in nameless processes1 develop in phases according to their kinds1 and end one day to make room for other transformations equally indescribable4 ,accordingly the pine-seed was carried by the river in devious courses1 thrown up on the bank1 snatched away by the wind1 rolled over the plains1 cast up the mountain-side1 tossed back into the fields1 led here and there for an incalculable time1 the sport of inapprehensible caprice4 ,a hundred times it nearly fell into a spot favourable for taking root1 and as often it was driven away from its goal by forces apparently hostile4 ,if the little seed had been gifted with an observing sense it would probably have seen the lot and end of every event in its own destiny4 ,once it hung for years a few inches from a suitable hole in some fat land1 and was left there unmoved by the fresh winds of spring-time1 by the ardent summers1 by the icy falls of snow4 ,nothing helped it2 till finally a pebble slipped--for some unrecorded reason--picked it up on one of its muddy faces and held it there for weeks1 to set it free again on a path of turf4 ,such incidents often happened1 to make the seed entertain the common hope of its species1 the chance of taking root2 but always some unknown force dashed the near fulfilment from it4 ,however1 one morning1 at the edge of a forest and on rain-softened ground1 the sequoia seed at last got leave to germinate4 ,the leave was given suddenly and precisely4 ,a gust of wind1 blowing across a dead calm1 lifted it some hundreds of yards at a bound1 and put it down on the slope of a mound of soil by an open hole4 ,none the less the seed might have lain short of its place for years1 for it was fixed firmly enough to nullify the impulse of the winds1 and the many and various undulations of the ground-surface2 but now at length its natural purpose was nearly achieved4 ,a few minutes later a dung-beetle arrived1 took it up between its claws1 easily avoided the several obstacles of the mound1 and dropped it1 as though intelligently1 on the very edge of the pit4 ,the insect then1 as in obedience to some non-apparent but exact will1 began heedlessly to fill in the hole with rich earth4 ,so from a little seed and a little soil there will be born here a sequoia gigantea1 the hugest plant of earth4 ,it seems a miracle that the future bulk of the tree1 its grain1 its pith1 the shape and colour of its needles1 the special nature of its sap1 the many tens of hundreds of years of its life should be found in a pin-head of vegetable fibre2 and another miracle that the microscopic seed should already contain not merely its plant's organic nature1 but also its tastes and distastes1 its pleasures and its pains1 all the range of yet unformed impressions which would colour its existence in the world4 ,in such changeless fashion does the vital spark of species run through a myriad centuries4 ,it was for the sequoia1 as it is for the innumerable forms of life upon earth1 for the solar planets1 and for those unknown planets circulating in space1 fragments perhaps of suns beyond our ken4 ,from this aspect the law of perpetuity seems to be an eternal re-beginning of the same careers1 to be pursued through similar stages to a like end4 ,how often we find in ourselves hopes1 desires1 griefs1 apparently unrelated to our own experiences and circumstances6 ,they come to us from very far1 these feelings1 and in answering to them we follow a mysterious and indiscoverable chain of forerunners4 ,their fate is to some extent our own4 ,like memory 7activity's retreating shadow71 their sensations mix and mirror themselves brokenly in us1 quickening in us hesitant1 half-felt surmises about their final cause1 or as to why these reflections of a long-lost age are sent to us4 ,the play of external events upon our destiny seems to us as inexplicable as the inherited influences which direct us from within4 ,the tiny seed1 for example1 in circumstances apparently hostile and unfavourable to its development1 yet by a few exact but unexpected actions of others1 found itself free to work out its fate2 and to work it out just after a moment when it had seemed indefinitely delayed4 ,we men living under the sun can usefully apply the lessons of our own existence to this case4 ,we are very far from grasping the whole scheme of the forces which dispose our lives2 indeed1 we get only faint occasional sidelights upon them4 ,they strike our attention often because of the mysterious symmetry with which certain things seem to happen4 ,we call them good and bad periods when an order of events occurs to help or hinder our fortunes2 and it is significant that there should be a family likeness in such series of affairs4 ,the vision of the lean and fat cows in the ,bible is only one instance of this age-old observation2 and we have also noted that cases apparently hopeless sometimes contain1 beyond our sight1 their own happy issue which bursts into view through a union of unexpected and apparently unrelated circumstances4 ,this law sways not merely our human affairs but universal fate4 ,does the all-creating ,eye really see and set in motion ,his whole universe rhythmically1 in tune with one principle which is concealed from our sight by the terrifying complexity of detail in daily life in the visible and invisible worlds8 ,if so1 the universe takes shape as a harmonious whole4 ,what we know and what we do not know of the millions of existences everywhere at any time all are driving towards a common end4 ,from the littlenesses here and the greatnesses there would emerge1 perhaps1 for those who could see it1 a whole immeasurably1 inconceivably huge4 ,the atoms seem a mass to us1 sometimes1 though doubtless they differ among themselves4 ,men1 despite their individual characters1 appear1 when seen in bulk and from a distance1 as a group-whole1 comparable with bees or ants4 ,from far enough our earth1 despite its diversifying hills and plains and valleys1 would seem a smooth body2 and if some being could comprehend the entire universe at once1 by means and from a view-point beyond our understanding1 what would it look like all-together8 ,that no man will ever tell us4 ,,chapter #c ,the ,kindly ,darkness ,buried between two layers of soil the little pine-kernel woke from its inactivity4 ,underground was warm and moist2 and therefore the seed swelled up with comfort1 and relaxed itself with pleasure4 ,the damp crept through it1 right through it1 with a gentle persistence in marked contrast with the brutal attack of the flood which had swept it away but had not broken down its stubborn defence4 ,the heat of the subsoil made the seed ferment1 and summoned it to live2 but the mysterious centre of life in it found a fellow-feeling in the equally mysterious darkness which wrapped it about1 full of the unaccountable impalpable emanations of all life upon earth4 ,for this dark we have an unreasonable fear1 and it is curious to inquire into the causes of the horror of blackness which fixes itself in our hearts at the moment of their first pulsations4 ,the black is soothing1 whence therefore our agony at thought of it8 ,why do our heads swim when we look at a graveyard and reckon the darkness of the tomb2 and the nothingness1 in its grip1 of things which have been but will be no more8 ,half-stifled we read a name inscribed on the marble slab1 and imagine the unknown dead man as he lived--what he did1 whom he loved1 how he suffered--and we conjure up in our minds the poor blank wraith1 now for ever departed from the light of day4 ,we can go further1 and from the one build up the army of those who have lived1 of those alive1 of those who will live after us3 and these unknown shadows press about our familiar faces1 flutter and crowd in and out of the stage-properties of our own existence--like dead leaves in the autumn winds4 ,particular shapes haunt us with disquieting persistency4 ,we find ourselves in streets1 or at shows1 or in public parks in the midst of a mob of people whom we do not know1 but who live beside us2 and we hear them speaking1 and can picture to ourselves what they care about4 ,they are of all ages1 old and young1 men1 women1 children1 black-eyed1 blue-eyed1 grey-eyed1 with fair or dark hair or hair withered white1 full-lipped1 or with lips shrivelled by passing time2 but all of them are living1 are there1 glad or sorry1 before our eyes4 ,an idea takes possession of us and strengthens in us till we tremble with it4 ,we think--,all these individuals about us1 whom we could touch as they move1 and whom we know to have feelings and hopes and preoccupations1 all these beings are destined to disappear one day1 whatever they do1 wherever they may be1 no matter how strong1 how well-founded1 how firm4 ,in a hundred years they will just have existed1 will be nowhere discoverable4 ,what will have become of them8 ,and again we see the cold1 forbidding cemeteries1 with the ranked and serried silent tombs all shut fast among their flowers4 ,we shiver at the thought that there1 under the cover-stones1 beneath the turf1 below thick layers of soil1 are only blanched bones scattered through that dark which makes us tremble with the notion that it is in some strange fashion our enemy4 ,such is the common mistake of reason when imagination has taken charge of a mind2 and in combating it we must first distinguish between its cause and its effects4 ,these shadows which we fear only have power upon us after we have irrevocably ceased to exist4 ,it is not the darkness which destroys us2 on the contrary1 it is profoundly creative1 doing its work1 with that odd prudishness of creation1 by choice out of sight4 ,it was in such a blank darkness underground that the sequoia seed germinated and burst open under the life-impulse4 ,the cotyledons1 rich in vivifying substances1 gave a beginning of nourishment to the seedling until it was able itself to select the elements which would assist its growth4 ,the darkness cradled the budding plant1 and would continue to prove its definite base after it had grown up to strength4 ,in all these functions there was no destructiveness1 nothing to excuse our fear of it4 ,the shades stand attentive about the seeds of plants1 as they surround the young of birds in the hatching egg1 as they contain the foetus in its mother's womb4 ,in the dark is the beginning of nearly all creative processes3 even the diamond forms itself so1 in the very bowels of the earth1 remote from us--there1 in a solid blackness1 it takes to itself that faceted shape which later will reflect the light from its every point4 ,these unfortunate shadows for which we harbour so unjust a fear6--and so illogical a fear1 for when our cells are worn out by the strain and stridency of life and day it is to darkness that we turn for the renewal of our vital force2 and when our hearts and spirits demand either calm in which to rest after the blows of misfortune1 or mending after the shock of disillusion1 again it is to the shadows that we have recourse1 and among them that we find hope--which is either the salve of fresh illusions or the satisfaction of reviewing our obtained petitions4 ,in this shadow-land our pine-microcosm accumulated the strength which enabled it to make an essay at living4 ,first it absorbed the starchy liquid which the cotyledons had prepared for it2 then it began itself to hunt in plant fashion for its own necessary sustenance4 ,through all its pores the tiny rootlet sucked up the particular juices and essences it needed4 ,it grew1 and divided itself into branches that it might tap more sub-soil with these many extensions4 ,it is warm down there underground1 and the soil was wet1 for it was spring-time outside4 ,the earth was pulsating mightily with the sense of new movement1 was transmitting its excitement to the air4 ,the light of day and the darkness of the pit communicate with one another by exchanging invisible and indescribable rays4 ,the decaying bodies of men1 animals1 and vegetable growths affect and influence their corresponding numbers at the moment of conception and during growth--reaching them as freely through the pellucid air as through the solid layers of the soil4 ,life and death everywhere run into one another3 every beginning is an end1 and everything ends only to begin again4 ,innumerable unknown forces come down from heaven to earth1 and as many shoot up from earth into the blue sky1 all crossing one another1 tangled together4 ,some are destructive1 some productive4 ,we cannot classify or estimate these millions of indiscoverable elements4 ,most of them never enter our orbit2 for we must remind ourselves that there are an infinity of creations1 of every sort and kind and lot and fate in our universe1 ranging from suns to microscopic cells1 each subject to tens of thousands of varying conditions1 and tending towards an incalculable number of predestined ends--and it is vain for our curious but purblind spirits to try to estimate separately or to distinguish these appalling problems1 for our limitations in kind forbid us ever to know the infinity of evolutions in earth and heaven1 in the depths of the seas1 in the depths of the earth4 ,it is impossible that we should ever learn what are the hidden powers which sway our courses1 what are the unknown and unsearchable emanations which breathe around us1 or over us1 and give us in hardly perceptible fashion a sense of confused joy1 a vague sadness1 or some heedless inexplicable fear4 ,,chapter #d ,contrasts which are not ,contrasts ,on the earth it was spring3 and the excitement of it drove underground4 ,our sprouting seed was caught up in this frenzy of living1 expanded itself1 and pushed downwards and upwards in a double movement1 under cover of that odd buckler1 the pileorhiza4 ,the light attracted it2 but at the same time it plunged deeper into the night1 for there it found hidden sympathies1 and encouragements which made it fierce and greedy4 ,it grew enormously1 draining to itself the scattered nourishment about it4 ,if other existences were starved thereby1 so much the worse for them4 ,not long ago our plant was a humble seed1 ready to beg its tiny life from each powerful menacing blade of grass4 ,to-day it was a successful bully1 drinking up all the ichor of its patch of soil3 and such conduct is the general rule1 even with us men4 ,when we are weak and know it1 we are timid crawling things1 hating all powers since they seem directed against us3 but let us gain a little strength1 and we grow proportionately rude1 beating down the weaker4 ,so true is it that evolution in nature is only a re-direction of energy4 ,the ,eye which controls the universe really seems to have foreseen and planned everything2 and things which appear unjust or horrible to us may appear so only because we do not know the full logic of their existence4 ,it is pleasant to imagine what happens deep down in that secret mansion of the lower earth4 ,the press of life can be no less there than on the face of the ground4 ,yet we call it a mystery1 and rank it with all that is beyond our sense1 with that class of event which even our imaginations fail to visualize precisely4 ,if only we could see the sequoia root with our eyes1 or had some yet unexpressed means with which to analyse or share its likes and dislikes1 watch its battles1 follow its sorrows1 its joys6 ,why were we not endowed with some special sense able to feel the satisfied tremor of the growing root when it made contact with kindly elements in the blank night8 ,from some distance1 somewhere deep under the ground1 a trickle of water sent it refreshing vibrations1 like a call4 ,how did our plant discover the presence of this distant and friendly liquid8 ,did it experience that familiar feeling of cool freshness which we men have near water1 which we would have felt in its place8 ,yet the plant had no skin like ours1 nor nerves1 nor sense of smell4 ,it is a mystery how it should have known things1 and how it guessed where lay the foodstuffs it needed1 and by what resources beyond our knowledge it perceived their existence4 ,it never missed its aim1 though it had to reach out1 twist1 even ramify1 to get at these food-elements1 and absorb them4 ,in nature there are hundreds of such instincts1 and senses1 and faculties1 besides the feelings1 or nerves1 or other appurtenances of the flesh of which we are made4 ,in life there are thousands of unknown energies1 of secret perceptions1 of indescribable vibrations1 which we never feel1 and shall never know while we are what we are4444 ,yes1 outside it was spring-time4 ,its light and heat bathed all the surface of the ground1 instilling into the under-soil a whole range of influences to affect some of the thousands of embryos which there come to life1 by stages which we cannot follow1 and of most of which we never become aware4 ,creation is so leisurely and so retiring that it makes little impression on us4 ,it is destruction which is the striking thing1 because it is quick and clear and violent4 ,an instant destroys a thing which we have long seen living and developing4 ,a tree many hundreds of years old is crashed down in a minute by lightning2 in a few days a forest fire will destroy a forest which has existed for thousands of years2 and this wanton annihilation instils in us a great terror1 together with an unintelligent belief in the goddess of destruction1 that savage and formidable power which seems to rule the world1 and fills us with devout awe3 she seems so mighty and so bold and ruthless that we think her the sole goddess of life4 ,such an idea comes to us because of the limited range of our knowledge and perceptions1 our only criteria of judgment4 ,in such conditions naturally it is the visible and tangible world which makes most effect on us4 ,yet we should remind ourselves that if a being under our eyes passes in a second from life to death1 yet in that same instant millions of similar beings are being created by the mysterious courses of organic nature3 just as while lightning is striking and consuming a giant of the forest in one burning moment1 simultaneously millions of such trees are germinating in the fruitful heat of mother-earth1 beyond our sphere of control4 ,we should note that in all ways and at all times creation has the numerical superiority over destruction1 whether it concerns men or animals or plants4 ,in truth we have no reason to complain that our senses have been reduced to such bare limits4 ,how palpitant life would be for us if new faculties superadded to our old gave us to see the invisible1 to understand the occult1 to apprehend like plants1 to feel in vibrations like light1 to flow abroad like seas and contemplate the bounds of space4 ,let it be enough if we record1 without seeking to explain it by finding a parallel in our equipment1 how singularly efficient our plant was in insinuating its roots where it would4 ,with the aid of its pileorhiza it passed not merely through crumbling soil1 but through stony strata1 plaster1 and wood4 ,another mystery1 this1 how so soft a substance could penetrate hard bodies1 which we burst through only by means of a great effort of strength1 using tools yet harder4 ,the sequoia root1 dipping downward in one direction1 thrusting upward in another1 without external aid split obstacles against which we have to employ iron and stone3 and at last one fine morning its first shoot pierced the top layer of soil to salute the sun4 ,at this second the plant was1 to our eyes1 at last born4 ,we commonly pass over its hardest battles1 those conditioned by the circumstances of its origin4 ,in reality it was while yet beneath the ground that the little sequoia tree experienced the mother-care of those kindly shades without which it could not have come to life3 but few of us take note of that4 ,we so commonly put the effect before the cause and the success before the effort4 ,yet our little plant went down as much as it went up1 with roots very like its crests1 though the one struck upward towards the sun1 and the other struck downward through the night4 ,i would say that this inexplicable symmetry is one of the laws which govern the seen1 and probably also the unseen1 world4 ,ideas1 beings1 things1 phenomena of all kinds exhibit to us much the same beginnings1 similar developments1 and parallel endings4 ,this fact we can grasp only piecemeal1 not in its whole2 but it is clear that always there is an analogy between extremes4 ,we know that plant-roots are like their heads4 ,dawn and twilight 7opposed limits of a natural event7 are like one another3 the same pallid colours1 the same freshness1 the same effect of unambitious calm4 ,sunrise and sunset1 respectively the appearance and the disappearance of our day-star1 glare at us with a like extravagance of noisy red4 ,old age and childhood1 the two poles of human life1 resemble one another in their feebleness and weak vitality4 ,our great joys are silent as our great sorrows2 and the ecstasy of love is not far from the frenzy of hate4 ,nature is re-born in spring-tide1 and falls sadly asleep when autumn closes3 and yet these two seasons are very like--showers of rain and gusty winds1 shot across with the same weak rays of yellow light4 ,we find this odd likeness of contrasts not merely in visible nature and in life1 but also in the most subtle abstractions of the spiritual world4 ,we expect a great happiness as anxiously as a great misfortune1 and when we do things our first conception1 and the memory which follows it1 trace in our minds the same sort of hazy contour in fleeting neutral tint4 ,the nescience of our birth is like our death's4 ,oh6 we know very well how some of these resemblances are caused--thanks to the action of the simple laws of physical nature--but our spirit fails when we ask why these analogies should appear with so strange and universal a regularity4 ,,chapter #e ,caught up into the ,stream of ,life ,in the summer when the sky was blue and the air diaphanous1 in autumn with its melancholy mist1 in winter when the wind blew cold and clean and sharp1 our tree lived on and prospered with the passing years4 ,for now it had become a tree1 a giant sequoia pine4 ,it stood a little clear of a forest in an open space1 and so looked solitary4 ,its head towered over the surrounding country from its place in the blue and green opalescent gulf of heaven4 ,the forest whose leaves danced tremblingly before its feet was made up of quite other trees3 delicate lively things1 of middle but swift height1 and thin-branched1 so that the wind and the sunlight wove patterns easily through their frail screen4 ,against this background the seasons passed leisurely1 the complete year seeming swifter than its parts3 so that if an ever-living spirit could have fixed itself deep within the fibres of the giant trunk while the waves of time broke about it1 and counted them as they came1 it would have found centuries fly past as lightly as single years4 ,if our faculties and standards of perception had been applicable to the pine1 how beautiful we1 in its place1 would have thought the world6 ,we would have noted the warmth1 the sense of space1 its limpid clarity3 also the colours and shapes and scents of things2 but did the tree know how splendid was the scene about it8 ,at times we think that it must have been sensitive to certain things4 ,yet surely it could not see the distant hill rolling away to the skyline1 gay and clean and bright in summer1 but pale and solemn in winter4 ,it could not admire the endless plain or the river winding near4 ,it paid no attention to the azure sky in which it bathed itself1 nor could it feel--at least not in any human sense--the caressing wind1 the rough embraces of the frost1 the cool breath of the water4 ,likewise it could not taste the open air1 or know the day flashing round it1 or be soothed by the calming shades of night4 ,it was unable to feel1 see1 hear1 or taste movement and light and noise and flavours1 as we can2 yet it received impressions to which we are blank1 and united itself ardently or voluptuously or uneasily with the other elements of its existence4 ,it would require a manufacture of new words 7to fit sensations foreign to our nature7 before our present understandings could appreciate plant-loves and hatreds1 and the things which please them or give them discomfort4 ,our tree became part of its whole environment1 of the hills1 of the plain1 of the atmosphere and scents of things1 by a constant interchange of matter4 ,its sap was drawn from the depths of the earth1 and rose unchecked through each breathing cell up to the crest of the tree4 ,it flowed rapidly about even the very smallest pores1 and thence from the topmost twig fell again as fast 7but this time rich with new ingredients7 to the lowest root4 ,we can easily gauge the chemical content of these ingredients1 but nevertheless the absorption on their passage of the nutritive particles remains a mystery4 ,they are drawn from all the elements of which the world is made up1 even in its most opposed forms3 and the various species of active things1 whether men or animals or plants1 select those actual ones proper for their nourishment1 after their kind1 and attract them through space and time1 through all the multitude of encompassing forces1 from solid matter1 from vapours or from liquids1 whatever their appearance and whatever their composition4 ,the sequoia1 for instance1 drew to itself what was qualified to make rough its red bark1 to harden the fibres of its stem1 to make smooth the green composition of its needles2 and drew them from the encircling air1 from the blue rays of light1 from the mist of waters1 from every motion and scent about it4 ,from the same vast whole1 made up of thousands of dissimilar bodies1 the birds draw their plumage1 the tortoises their shells1 the worms their rings1 the flowers their petals1 and humankind their complexions1 their blood and flesh4 ,we are fully aware that these substances are all carbon in divers forms2 but that raises the fresh question1 when we ponder it1 whether the whole universe is not of a single sameness--a vision of mind-wracking infinity repeating itself in a perpetual changeless series8 and that might lead us to stand in astonished awe before a nature which can make a bone1 or pearl-shell1 or a wing-case1 or a claw1 or an eyelash from the same elements whether they are of the air we breathe1 of the light shining from our eyes1 or of any other transformation of appearance or taste4 ,however1 even if the matter be the same1 the forces which cause it to take shape are infinite4 ,how many must be the sources of energy which together compose the complete eternal mirror-disk of life1 in which from time to time we catch glimpses of vague forms1 as it whirls on its mad course1 bearing away worlds too big for our failing minds to comprehend1 or too small for our blunted senses to distinguish8 ,above all1 this dazzling multiple disk teaches us motion and harmony3 that is to say1 labour and love4 ,the largest planet like the smallest atom exists by combination and by movement4 ,look upon the million needles of the sequoia pine1 how they everlastingly breathed in and out1 drawing gases and water from the air and returning others4 ,the stomata never stopped work for an instant4 ,within the seeds the sap worked as unceasingly4 ,nothing ever dwells in absolute inertia for a moment anywhere4 ,the atmosphere vibrates1 light pierces1 hearts beat1 water flows1 the molecules of crystals build themselves together1 the stars revolve1 the air stirs1 the darkness is propitious to growth3 through everything is spun the cord of love and labour4 ,perhaps1 when we contemplate the tireless labour of the bees and ants as they run here and there1 and reinforce one another in an endless series of the same acts1 with apparently their sole purpose in the next generation--perhaps a dismal weariness steals over us at the sight of such everlasting monotony of labour1 and at a feeling that their futile efforts much resemble our own2 but we may legitimately remind ourselves that our ignorance of the complete scheme of things inhibits or at least vitiates our judgment2 also that the chain of succession1 from father to son in an endless series stretching away to infinity1 is ,nature's first law4 ,just as nothing isolated happens in nature1 so nothing exists which is isolated or peculiar4 ,what we call our individuality is only a congeries of cells3 just as what we call an adventure is a complex of events tending towards a single defined end4 ,it would be wrong for us to pick out and treat of any single one of the tribulations of the pine-seed on its described huge journey1 except in relation to the result of the history1 the mighty tree towering like a red pillar four hundred feet into the air4 ,likewise with our storied lives4 ,we will find nothing irregular in them if we realize that they existed before they became patent1 and that our minds became aware of them only when they developed in some apparently fresh phase to which we were peculiarly sensitive4 ,a good example is the ray of light which left a star centuries ago1 but which we notice only as it enters our limited field of vision4 ,the least important event has a history going back far beyond our mind's reach3 we cannot fix the start of any thing1 or of any creature1 or of any circumstance4 ,this enormous tree1 whose shadow falls across my book1 and whose history we are tracing 444 what began it8 ,how did the class of giant pine arise8 ,the most evanescent happening carries back through adventure upon adventure to infinity1 and if we could trace back everything to its first cause1 probably we would be astonished to find small consequences to things which we think magnificent1 and would find that our grandest created things took their rise in ordinary and insignificant circumstances4 ,we may lawfully presume that the past has been universal1 and that the future will be the same2 for probably everything happened in the eternity which preceded us1 and everything will certainly happen in the limitless time which will succeed our paltry moments4 ,where do we come from8 ,what was our first shape8 ,academic questions these1 perhaps of no great urgency1 but none the less difficult for us to picture4 ,we feel distinctly enough what is good or bad in our experiences of the moment2 yet we cannot in the least evade our destinies2 and our impotence supplies us with a reason for casting out despair1 and accepting with dignity what fate offers4 ,seconds build up into minutes1 and minutes into hours1 and these into the days of our life2 and so also far-fetched trifles accumulate into occasions4 ,it depends on our circumstances whether they seek us out or whether we go to them4 ,every being possessing activity1 that is1 which has a relation with space and a temporary faculty of volition1 moves towards change as change moves towards him4 ,the mobile beings1 such as men and beasts and birds1 as often as they move1 make progress towards some small or large point in their history4 ,their change of position makes them encounter the unexpected1 which is itself perhaps coming towards them4 ,our pine-tree1 however1 being of the plant class1 was rooted in one place1 and had to attend its changes there4 ,for of course its history was full of change4 ,in seed-shape it had wandered across the world1 its devious course lying sometimes on the surface of the ground1 sometimes in the water1 sometimes in the air4 ,now1 being a tree1 its wanderings were over2 but its normal life yet varied nearly from day to day4 ,the scene 7to our eyes changeless7 in which it stood no doubt changed without our being able to see the differences4 ,we have no bark or needles or sap1 and cannot therefore enter into the feelings of the tree which with them knew how clouds modulated its light1 how the passing wind varied its scent and texture according to the distance or direction from which it came1 how the rain-drops tasted so one time and so another time1 their very elements seeming different according as the seasons varied the sensitiveness of the great lonely tree4 ,anyhow1 we should remember that with plants it will not be as with us4 ,lacking our faculties1 they may yet be richer than us in other directions1 endowed with senses whose deficiency in ourselves we cannot perceive3 and perhaps even things have their senses4 ,there may really be tears in things4 ,it would be an attractive doctrine that the energies which affect inanimate things may affect them in sensible degrees1 that the universe 7which is a rounded whole7 obeys the same laws in forms which change according to circumstance1 but remain alike in force and means4 ,,chapter #f ,the ,law of ,balance ,how lustreless and same the passage of time appears when we review it in our memory6 but how uncertain and varied it is when we live it moment by moment1 leaning out of each second to encounter the next6 ,likewise with the life of the great tree4 ,its sap on the daily round of work may have had fresh pleasures and discomforts at each revolution2 but the tree's life seemed to have slipped past in a tame monotony when taken in a period of thirty or forty centuries4 ,yet it may be that the sequoia felt the seasons change about it1 and that the times and scenes 7so constant to our eyes7 in which it lived affected it variously1 just as its great outline may not have been without influence on its own country4 ,one can picture the huge reddish spout leaping up into the air1 with a hazy network of hundreds of branches about it4 ,its head seemed to be lost in the blue4 ,its bole was twenty-five paces about1 but against its enormous height such a thickness seemed slight1 and the whole tree had an air of slender grace1 quite unlike other great trees1 as1 for instance1 the baobab1 whose trunk might be thicker than a sequoia trunk1 but whose height would be incomparably less4 ,like all conifers1 the root-system of the sequoia was not elaborate4 ,of course it had great roots1 and many of them1 and luxuriant ones--but not to compare with the tree's size4 ,here also one may trace the all-seeing ,eye1 having regard for universal harmony4 ,if trunk and roots were in due proportion1 the tree's appetite would be empowered to satisfy its hunger by ravaging an immense area of ground4 ,its roots would exhaust the vital essences from a wide circle1 and reduce it to a desert4 ,so the principle of balance enters1 and applies itself to the pine-giant3 and we find if we search diligently into nature that its greatest creatures have their weak spots1 and the feeblest things of the world have their unexpected means of defence4 ,examples of this law are well found in the fantastic prehistoric time4 ,through its dense jungle rolled a nightmare shape1 a reptile 7called the ,diplodocus7 unnaturally huge1 perhaps a hundred feet long and proportionally tall4 ,on the end of its prolonged neck was a grotesque little head1 in which stared two glassy stupid eyes4 ,the beast would seem to have been doomed to a miserable life1 for to nourish its demensurate body would require nearly unlimited food1 and it had only a tiny mouth1 able to pick up a spoonful at a time4 ,so poor ,diplodocus passed his whole life chewing leaves1 and had no time off for sleep or holiday4 ,he could do nothing all the while but eat1 and so by the law of compensation his greatness was brought low4 ,if his head had been as good as his body1 and if instead of being only a grass-eating lizard he had learned to eat meat1 then nothing alive could have resisted him1 and he would have depopulated his radius of action4 ,this harmony in life1 this astonishing foresight watching over matter makes one think4 ,every source of energy in the world has irrefragible bounds marked out for it4 ,the curse of ,diplodocus seems to have fallen on our modern whale1 whose strength would make the sea barren of other life if its gullet had not been made too small to swallow them4 ,what a danger for the rest of the world that other mammal1 the elephant1 might have been with his union of strength and intelligence1 had his nature not been made so peaceable1 and the period of gestation so long6 ,lions1 tigers and panthers are fierce and powerful1 but have found a pitiless exterminator in man4 ,the larger felines have ever been the most tempting game for hunters1 who pursue them with particular zest3 and things are always so1 everywhere4 ,men give infinite reasons or pretexts1 on which they think 7or say they think7 they acted3 but behind all these we can trace the constant operation of an immutable law1 to which their obedience is implicit4 ,this terrible law of compensations cuts often across our brief freedom--across those periods when we fancy ourselves all-powerful1 masters of the event4 ,we might really be so1 if the ,eye was not watching and regulating the smallest details of creation3 but as it is1 this law which checks excessive strength comes into operation against us1 using ourselves as its own means4 ,it may be for this reason that we are tormented by drugs or drinks or other plagues2 for most non-human beings are comparatively free of them1 and they cause any number of weaknesses and harmful complications1 fatal to the health of society4 ,as a crowning debilitant we have our man-devouring wars4 ,for it really seems that they must be half-divine1 these terrible events which impose themselves upon us1 as though at the dictates of superhuman authority4 ,if fate did not decree them how could these wars yet pour out the life-blood of our peoples1 since man has always condemned them with the whole force of his reason8 ,no one1 whether the greatest conqueror or the most commonplace individual1 has ever dared to speak of war without exposing its sorry character3 unless he curses it3 and such is the plainest common sense4 ,there leap to our minds a thousand reasons against war1 whenever we need them4 ,only when the crisis comes and the clash of peoples is prepared1 then human beings savagely acclaim it4 ,they burn with the sense of battle1 a madness which comes upon them from without and masters them1 so that they can speak only with its voice4 ,just as the roots of plants have the pileorhiza to stay their first feebleness and let them fight out their rivalries with the other beings of the under-world1 so when war begins this obscure law injects us with patriotism1 a draught which gives us strength and courage to support the miseries of its train4 ,daily it is said1 ,war would be easily prevented4 ,all that is needful is for every man alive to forswear it4 ,if at the same moment we all refused to make a move against our kind1 these fires consuming men would be at once put out4 ,yes1 but exactly this apparently easy agreement and common action never happen4 ,when the moment comes for armed slaughter men are unanimous only in fierce support of pretexts for beginning it4 ,when the storm has passed we are astounded and rather horrified to look back on our bloodthirsty record1 and like a river sinking back into its bed after a flood1 we return gradually to our habitual peace and quietude3--too late1 alas6 for the will of the gods has been done and humanity has paid its bloody tribute to their law of death4 ,at the next date of bleeding the whole round will begin again1 just as before4 ,so ,diplodocus' little head1 his point of weakness1 may be made a symbol of this malady of man4 ,and the reason why we should be subjected to this inflexible law8 ,no doubt that our too-great strength be brought down 444 but it remains a question whether the too-great strength is because our numbers are over-many for the earth to bear1 or because we are near discovering and exploiting the working of the greater powers of nature4 ,it may also be the law of checks and balances pursuing its course against all excessive strengths1 which gives the riches and resources of this world to ordinary people1 rather than to those mighty spirits with character enough to overturn their generations4 ,one can imagine what might have happened had the great scholars or thinkers whose writings revolutionized life had in their hands the power of a despot or the wealth of ,croesus4 ,you can't have everything is the hackneyed phrase in which common sense has tried to express one of the most disturbing truths of the universe4 ,however much it may appear so1 nowhere is any excess of power allowed to disturb the balance of things4 ,absolute equality is of course equally out of the question1 for harmony is based always on the union of unlike things4 ,one pine-tree could observe this law working in its sphere of life1 through the thousands of years for which it stood there4 ,generation after generation of birds and insects followed one another on its stem and branches4 ,some days were dismal1 others glorious1 just as some hours were unprofitable and others rich4 ,the light and warmth were not always divided to it in equal part4 ,underground the moisture did not always refresh its mazy roots in fair degree4 ,clouds often veiled its blue sky3 the seasons made that swelling hill bare and sad as often as they made it smile with waving green4 ,the giant tree saw its needles grow from freshness into pallor1 and then fall1 thousands of times4 ,some of its branches for no visible reason grew splendidly1 while others1 also for no visible reason1 remained small and stunted4 ,yet still its life1 as a whole1 was lived in tune1 as ours are to our content1 however discordant the individual moments4 ,a single ray of light is enough to scatter the darkness3 and when we think of the surroundings in which the giant lived1 the idea comes that perhaps we would fear death less if it were not for that haunting picture of our corpses rotting slowly in the darkness underground4 ,we might live more in love with death if we knew that our dust would remain under the sun1 to change and re-model itself in plant-fashion1 like those yellow leaves which wither and fall before winter comes4 ,it would assuage our minds if we could think that after our end we would live yet in the shimmering day1 absorbed particles of that great life-filled space this side the limitless ether of the stars4 ,,chapter #g ,metamorphoses ,as space creates all things out of its own substance only to devour them again at last1 so time which itself cannot move or change allots to everything its span of life4 ,our hours and days are within us1 and it is the revolution of the globe1 and not time1 which makes the seasons4 ,yet beings and things succeed one another1 and their courses give us an illusion that the age grows old4 ,it is a convenient figure1 for it is good to say that the days slip past and the seasons wheel round1 each in turn4 ,once more spring made green the mighty tree4 ,the sun and the winds fretted its newly-budded branches4 ,the giant began to transform itself4 ,like last year1 and the thousands of years before1 the sap made buds which pushed out into leaves1 into flowers1 and at last into fruits from which the future seeds would be born4 ,each spring inaugurated an ascending change1 to be followed1 this year as in the dead years1 by a descending change4 ,so the sap in its evolution took the common way of all life's forces4 ,it rose towards its highest forms1 in turn becoming leaf and flower and fruit3 and then it fell away in hard1 dry1 woodenish particles4 ,through this history of changing shape passes all we know1 ideas as well as things4 ,even our feelings are not exempt4 ,everything within and without us alters and re-forms itself3 so that there is no changeless situation1 nothing which is for ever exactly the same4 ,in the indestructible and turbulent race of matter one universal essence is working in a fixed direction3 and if the tree-sap changed into wood1 after having triumphally been green leaf and shining flower1 so does implacable fate lead our component cells through exquisite childhood into splendid youth1 only to change us at last into tottering and wasted creatures of old age4 ,the elements alter their shape through time and space4 ,in the same light1 in the same conditions and circumstances1 flowers bloom and fade1 our hair turns from its first dark or fair colour into silver1 our eyes lose their early fire1 our firm red flesh goes dry and shrivelled4 ,these changes happen to the same drop of sap in the plant world1 and to the same tissue in the animal world4 ,in the unexplored world of instinct our senses follow a similar evolution4 ,our enthusiasm for something or other springs to life1 lasts awhile1 and then chills into complete detachment4 ,love is akin to hate1 says a proverb3 but really the two states run together4 ,our indifference or our dislike is often born of an exhausted regard3 otherwise would we so often come to hate what we once enjoyed8 ,no1 these rising and falling changes are not confined to plants1 but are a general part of evolution1 in material as in immaterial things4 ,springtime1 however1 with its thrill towards active life prevailed once again upon the earth4 ,the sap was boiling up in the inmost pores of the giant tree4 ,it was shaken in mysterious travail1 sharing1 in its tree-fashion1 the corresponding sensations of living beings3 but expressing them of course very differently4 ,its passionate re-birth was shown in the perfumes which it released1 in the trembling of its branches1 in its needles flashing silver in the moonlight1 or golden in the full light of the sun4 ,yet these enigmatical eddies were those of the new year1 the same which make our blood hot and our desires keen4 ,the universal mysterious analogy of all life again forces itself on our reeling minds4 ,these millions of shoots and needles in the pine were produced with such profusion only to grow old and die1 like lives passing away1 while the great tree stood steady in the midst of them1 rooted and intact4 ,our nerve cells and tissues in a like fashion renew themselves day and night1 without our giving them a thought1 so absorbed are we in living our lives to our full bent4 ,the pine-tree lived on the subsidiary lives of each of its utricles1 and exhausted something of its reserve force with each generation of them passed by3 and so do we grow old with each of their deaths as the tiny cells in us die without our heeding4 ,life seems to whirl like a top1 getting apparently the momentum for a new spin from each spin past1 but actually failing steadily towards its final rest4 ,each slipping moment leaves us inevitably nearer to our end1 however it may seem to give us spring and key for fuller existence4 ,especially in spring-time does a new life seem to be working in us4 ,a mute exhilaration flows through all our nerves1 making them tingle like the needles of the giant pine4 ,beings and things open in one great vibration1 whose repercussion is felt even in the dark places underground4 ,subtle aspirations emanate from here and there1 and cross one another confusedly3 yet in their varied and varying shapes whirling aloft in the air1 inspiring living creatures or burgeoning in plants1 they are only multiple aspects of one central influence4 ,these very diverse expressions are all products of one faculty1 vivified by the same ichor4 ,a puff of wind stirred the twigs of the forest giant4 ,the sun was setting in a western sky heaped with purple and violet and rosy clouds4 ,there was a confused movement of many forms of life in the darkling wood1 whose smallness beside it made the sequoia tree seem a disproportionate sentinel4 ,twilight slid into darkness1 dissipated early by a silver moon4 ,a cloud of insects rose up the reddish trunk of the pine4 ,they glittered or suggested red and blue and emerald green1 blended or particoloured4 ,their tiny feet swarmed up the rude bark silently4 ,on the ground other tiny insects gleamed greenly through the grass1 or darkened its sandy surface with queer black shadows4 ,they paired1 in obedience to the instinct which had made the dainty butterflies all the afternoon flutter together intimately4 ,the echo of croaking frogs came keenly from the distance1 through the myriad smells of evening4 ,everything seemed possessed1 reeling with excitement1 and with a grave disturbance of spirit1 before the might of this hetero-sexual instinct1 which drives male upon female1 revives the splendour of birds' plumage1 sharpens the note of frogs1 distils the scents of flowers1 causes the shallow stream to laugh aloud1 makes the meadow-grasses to dance1 and the tigers to roar with excess of life3 which is able also to twine serpents in a slimy embrace1 and to whirl the deadly scorpions in a loathsome ecstasy4 ,it seems so universal1 this omnipotent force1 able to run down the moonbeams1 to flutter in the wind1 to wave with the grasses1 to thrill through all the atmosphere4 ,it makes human beings cling together in quivering couples1 jerking to the pull of its nameless demand3 and truly seems one spirit in these many shapes1 an imperious will which in all these varied pairings is shadowing out the frame of the master-law of reproduction4 ,even the elements appear subject to its sway3 for this passion which binds one to another of a kind that every sort may see something of universality in its single mood1 may it not be this which puts the little more of glory in the sunlight1 that extra softness in the air of night1 that repose in open space1 that richer music in the waves1 that purer purity in heaven1 and on earth that sustained thrill8 ,from head to foot the giant tree responded to the new warmth of sentiment in nature4 ,while the sun shone the birds had mated in its boughs4 ,now1 in the moonshine1 the insects had their turn1 and clung together silently in the vague shimmering mist of their brilliant colours4 ,deep in the soil the tap-roots of plants swelled up in pleasure3 in the air floated a sea of all imaginable scents1 impalpable unseen messengers through space of the universal fluid which betrays itself to our sense of smell on the one side1 and on another side in the strange lights of lovers' eyes4 ,if we remember how the loved one would tell us her feelings and her inmost thoughts by a mere glance1 then it will not seem to us far-fetched that plants hold converse in the perfumes which they scatter in the air4 ,these invisible and intangible but powerful scents1 which spread abroad to invite insects and to stupefy us with nebulous desires1 seem to play much the same role as the magnetism of our looks1 that other strange power which is able by shuffling the blues and blacks and greens of our eyes to express love or indifference or hate2 and without any change of shape or colour can reassure with gentleness or paralyse with terror1 conveying the most subtle shades of desire and passion and command4 ,,chapter #h ,what the ,moon ,saw ,meanwhile there were showering down on earth the beams of that moon1 mirror and transmitter of the sun1 which conveys to us its light without its heat4 ,from the distance came the splashing of water3 and on the river bank1 where it was nearest to the tree and within sight1 lay a man and woman4 ,they were naked1 and the water was dripping slowly from their bronzed bodies4 ,they lay aside by side1 and the low murmur of their voices and their stifled kisses filled the near air about4 ,beyond and around them eddied the confused noises of the fields and woods1 the scents of evening made lively by the cool damp air1 the brightness of the moon's shining on the silvan landscape1 a selection of all the sounds and shapes and tints and flavours in the world4 ,the contagion of universal love had caught the lovers1 making their eyes hard1 their blood hot1 their lips red4 ,the everlasting universal thrill which makes the flowers burst into bloom1 which makes the insects glitter and the birds sing1 was upon these two1 flinging them into a mutual passionate embrace4 ,they were just another instance of the immortal lust of conjoined sexes4 ,their sighs rustled between their lips like the wind in the grass1 they sobbed together like the breaking sea1 their flesh tingled with their blood as did the fibres of the forest giant with sap4 ,their inchoate and always unfulfilled desires took wing in the clear blue evening and became part of the immense and complex harmony of a thousand strains which has reigned since the beginning of the worlds1 in the ether1 to the stars1 about the stars1 beyond them1 even to the confines of illimitable space4 ,the great pine-tree in its six thousand years had many times seen substances mating and beings marrying1 and was able to record that these two young naked humans were exactly like the thousands of other couples whose loves it had witnessed since that distant time when as a tender plant it had pushed its shy and timid way towards the blue4 ,for sixty centuries generation of man had succeeded generation beneath the tree1 but whatever differences there might have been in their external circumstances or in the superficial accessories of their state1 always when in love their couples used to embrace naked on such spring evenings as this1 with the same ceremony and as ecstatically as the pair to-day4 ,the forest giant from its lofty crest was thus able to establish that mankind had remained essentially the same through the six thousand years4 ,love is the strongest of our passions1 but also that which we hide the deepest3 whereas we exhibit our ambitions1 our pride1 our greed1 our frenzies1 openly4 ,yet when love does take possession of us it sharpens and exalts our dullest1 remotest faculties to the height3 but it is a moot point whether we are right to believe it exclusively our work1 a sentiment evoked by our own means4 ,there is a disturbing possibility that it may be imposed on us regardless of our will4 ,we are not able to extinguish it1 nor to fan it3 for its potent causes lie deep beyond our sight1 and are fleeting4 ,we often see men carried away by a passion for some one who is not in the least their ideal1 and see this passion grow greater or smaller without valid cause4 ,insignificant trifles1 and impressions of the apparent slightest sometimes have enormous consequences in our lives4 ,love is called up or frightened away by the faintest ghost of a memory1 by the waking impression of a forgotten dream1 by some homely detail4 ,the faculty of love has been transmitted through our generations for thousands of years1 unchanged3 for the tremor which excited our forbears in their caves was1 in its kind1 of the intensity of the embrace of the sexes to-day4 ,the truth would seem to be that in love we obey an eternal1 general and boundless law4 ,in our conceit we think that no emotion is comparable to the fever of passionate mankind4 ,yet what can we know of the particular sensations possessing inhuman couples8 such as the fervour of a plant in seed1 or that colossal attraction which drags planets into the orbits of their suns4 ,our love-dramas and kisses and excitements are mere examples of the universal spasm4 ,let us return to the man and woman within sight of the upper branches of the pine as they lay supine on the green bank of the river taking their ease after happy exertions4 ,the slight sound of their voluptuous sighs had died away down the breeze4 ,the vibrations of their meeting flesh had gone abroad through the blue evening1 with the beaded moisture evaporating from their skins1 and the heating scents of awakened sex1 to become part of the endless waves of ether set up by the motions of the stars1 by the odorous love-excitements of birds and beasts and reptiles1 by the pollen of seeding plants4 ,of course the embracing couple did not know it3 they knew nothing of the movement of the ,spheres and their ,rivers of life1 nor of their component cells nor of the uncounted tribes of germs living within their bodies4 ,yet at the very crisis of the amorous passion the infinitely small no doubt bear their part in it to some degree1 just as the lovers in their act have contributed to the harmony of the universe4 ,we must try to think of ourselves existing as it were detached1 hanging between an external medley of forces beyond our ken1 and an internal current of life equally inappreciable by our senses4 ,we seem to become sensitive to exterior sensation only locally1 in the parts immediately affected4 ,when lovers kiss the delight of it attacks mouth and heart and spirit alone4 ,we never think that our arms or shoulders may also be concerned4 ,yet on reflection it would seem incontestable that the mere localization of the conscious emotion cannot prevent its being shared generally by our whole being4 ,the kiss1 though expressed only by our lips1 is a product of the vitality of all our organs3 and likewise in each of our actions we1 from our tiny sector of the world1 share in the universal harmony1 though we cannot know the extent of our contribution nor trace its course through the clash of external forces4 ,it is a grave thought that in this indescribable whole the separate items of activity undergo an identical evolutionary process4 ,when the sky was blue1 in the piercing sunlight of a fragrant summer-time1 the forest giant attained its highest pitch1 as its branches were rich and supple with sap4 ,then came days of decline4 ,under a feeble sun and a lack-lustre sky the air grew cold and faint3 and the tree entered on a phase of decline1 slow at first but increasing in speed till almost precipitate4 ,declines and falls have also 7like all else7 their charts of intensity growing to a climax and falling away inevitably thereafter4 ,a stone flung into the air has a history like the giant tree4 ,it shoots up1 up1 to its highest point1 dwells on it1 as it were1 for a fraction of a second1 and then turns to fall1 gently at first1 but later coming down with an increasing rush4 ,this change up and change down seem to be one of the prime laws of life and of matter and of energy1 from the boundless existence of the constellations to the atoms and the inexpressible complexities of nature4 ,everything seems subject to such a process and our imaginations cannot conceive anything exempt1 or anything which will ever be exempt4 ,a stone flung up and falling1 a branch budding and growing bare1 a fire flaring up and going out1 a sentiment being born1 developing and dying1 everything good or bad in events and in things1 in the animal creation1 and in plants1 in suns and in particles1 in everything that is or happens1 exhibit obedience to this universal law of change1 growth and decay4 ,detached atoms retain the character and share the fate of their former whole4 ,the lovers on the sloping river-bank near the giant tree were thus reproducing the universal harmony1 in their narrow and temporary harmony1 as they clipped and twined together in rhythmical counterchange of their inmost emotions4 ,they were so much larger than the insects which shone red in the sunset or turned green in the moonshine3 they were so much smaller than the tree3 yet in their degree and kind they were in accord with the course of nature1 as expressed in the force which linked the fireflies and made the tree bear seed4 ,they partook of the ambitions which coming from the mists of time and from the chaos of space make planets revolve in their orbits and electrons whirl together3 and if our insatiable curiosity makes us seek to know1 however dimly1 what is going on up there or down there1 let us tell ourselves that we are part of all that is1 that we obey the very laws which govern alike the unimaginable whole and its hugest components1 and that therefore our infinitesimal experience if we can expand or contract it indefinitely may guide us as to the experiences both of the greatest and of the smallest4 ,poor loving couple whom we have left sobbing with pleasure in the harmonious and fragrant evening-light6 ,it was written that their transport should die1 like all else in this world1 and that a falling cadence should close it1 making its course one with those of the suns and trees4 ,the conviction that our joys are transient may make us sad3 but we can draw consolation from the idea that all the dwellers in chaos are within the law4 ,by taking thought we can make strong our souls1 and still them1 with the certain knowledge of our utter helplessness4 ,yes1 the moment was good for the man and woman by the tall and splendid tree1 as they throbbed together in the new sensitiveness of their overcharged emotion3 but remorselessly decline will follow on the climax1 not merely in the case of the love that grows faint1 but for the summer which must yield place to winter1 for youth on which old age is waiting1 for the spray of water which rises to its height only to fall1 for the suns which to-day dazzle us1 but for some few ten thousand years are doomed to a slow expiry till they shall go round and round their unyielding prisons of space in blind stiff loneliness4 ,the spiral of being leaps up rapidly to its brilliant apogee1 and then runs down again into obscurity while the ring-waves of each action expand ever outward in the infinite4 ,,chapter #i ,when the ,corselet ,snaps ,more pine kernels had sprouted near by1 and the great tree was now kept company by other russet trunks1 tens of centuries younger1 but undergoing the same development4 ,they grew and changed against the same background as the older tree1 extracting the nourishment which formed their shape and colour1 sap and scent1 from the same area4 ,again the law of perpetuity asserted itself in creation4 ,near the giant a young tree was fainting and failing4 ,it had not the strong straight shape of the other conifers1 nor their sharp1 shining needles4 ,its current of life was crossed1 confused4 ,its sap did not fill its roots and branches1 its wood was unhealthy3 while on its gnarled trunk grew and increased year by year a huge boss of dead matter1 whose weight seemed to crush the whole organism4 ,the stomata laboured feebly in their task of collecting food from the environs1 and so reduced the tree's vitality that it felt no thrill from the bounty of spring or summer1 while hardly was there any flavour in the weak sap which crept drop by drop through the sick veins of its branches4 ,it seemed tired and faint-hearted in its travail1 this sap1 like an aged workman3 and the tree's whole attitude and effect was that of old age1 of a failing constitution such as marks the last stages of life in trees long past their prime4 ,for this young sequoia was sick4 ,its soggy utricles made no response to the new winds of spring-tide1 and were as insensible to sunlight and to the rays of a cloudless sky4 ,the fine weather which made the giant so brave and fresh in foliage had no effect on this4 ,its slow1 sad invalid existence made it more and more like a tree whose cadence was closing with its pale1 fagged flagging tissue4 ,to an external observer its sickness was as though the coat of mail which linked in and protected its life had parted1 and let all its fibres grow odd and wrong4 ,the course of development had been broken1 and the shattered rhythm had thrown out even the smallest cells4 ,their disordered whole was sad and sick with incurable disease1 a premature old age with its petulant inconsequence3 and if this sickness might be called premature age1 age might be called a slow sickness4 ,plants and creatures have their illnesses1 things their malformations1 planets no doubt their disasters3 and since the fates of puissant things are those of futile things may we presume that there are mishaps also for the ordered whole8 ,the analogies between stars and the microscopic dust of chemical particles impress themselves more and more upon our notice4 ,interstellar space seems proportionately no richer in movement or in matter than atomic space1 and fancy1 running beyond our physical powers of apprehension from one to other1 falls ever into the same nescience4 ,we can guess at a common rhythm behind the march of events and the linked procession of acts3 so that our superstitions may be only distorted glimpses of design half-understood1 scattered observations which our unequal spirits cannot join together4 ,our superstitions take precise shape more especially when we are in bodily pain and perturbed in spirit4 ,our imagination then sublimates the shadows of our fate1 flickering over them like a marsh-light in the darkness of our half-knowledge2 and achieves only to make their obscurity more obscure4 ,the young sequoia tree because of its sickness could do no more than just carry on its stunted life4 ,the breath entered faintly into its labouring lungs3 its whole life was limited by its deficient sap1 and by the futile ineffective busyness of its stomata4 ,yet it accepted the ill-health as a normal state4 ,the idea of a more fortunate life could not come to it1 as it might to men4 ,it had never known any other condition than this painful breathing-in of the life-currents1 this poverty of exhalation1 and so could not desire a better3 whereas human beings in pain feel it all the more since their spirits can disengage themselves from the trammels of the flesh and conjure up visions of a happier fate4 ,in such a way we make worse our torments each time we long to be delivered from them4 ,a scented breath of evening floated beneath the starry sky4 ,plants and creatures came to life at its whisper1 which combined with the far-away murmur of the river and the resonance of space to give a new vividness to the grove of young pines4 ,the tall and magnificent giant with the full flush of its grown strength made this sweetness of nature its own4 ,only the sick tree remained without benefit from the life-giving evening airs4 ,its sluggish viscid sap stagnated in the clogged stomata4 ,slowly its faint exhalations were breathed out through its pores3 it seemed as though nothing could revive this imperfect organism3 and as a matter of fact the first effect of illness is to disorganize the senses1 to shatter the harmony of the unit attacked1 so that it receives insufficiently and returns to the universal flow an insufficient rhythm4 ,we have all had experience for a shorter or a longer time of this heart-breaking state of sickness1 when a livid mist seems to settle itself thickly over our faculties1 and the objective world weighs upon us with the whole weight of our material blemishes4 ,at such a time our sensitiveness to influences outside ourselves is bad1 whether it is that our disease-crippled organs are no longer powerful enough to communicate freely with the hidden forces through whose paths we move1 or whether it is that these very forces in a manner avoid an unhealthy assemblage4 ,anyhow1 it is only when suffering has disordered our state that we become fully aware of the gulf which lies between the external world and that other world within us4 ,but what we learn more particularly at such moments is how our senses limit external influences4 ,our inner world is seething with a form of life which feels special to itself1 since all contact with the vital currents of our environment has been cut off4 ,also1 apart from a slight play given to the organs our physical sensibility detaches itself entirely from external adventures and elements4 ,when our being has once reached this absolute it fixes itself there1 and no piling up of circumstance1 in however extravagant a degree1 could move it an inch farther4 ,thus a loss of consciousness through illness involves as vivid a sense of dizzy falling into space as a literal plunge into some darkling abyss1 and the perturbation of an inward malady may strike us as suddenly and sharply as the flash of a real lightning-stroke jazzing across our eyes4 ,in all the world there is no force able to extend or prolong our sensibility beyond its fixed term2 which may be a reflection upon the poverty of our means of apprehension4 ,we would not hear the crash of two colliding planets as loudly as the piercing of our ear-drums by a pin-point1 and to be burned alive in some conflagration is for the individual as though the universe went up in flame1 since for those few seconds of his agony the intensity of the heat of his burning house is as great upon him as the fires of an incandescent world4 ,a heart struck by a fragment of bursting shell would feel no more if it was caught up and crushed between clashing faces of rock4 ,so by means of our senses we can measure against our being the greatest physical catastrophes3 we can know the supreme degree of our faculty for feeling pain without calling for a clash of worlds to prove it4 ,the limitations of our senses are such that beyond a quite-near point they can register no advance at all4 ,it is all the same sensation whether we fall three hundred or thirty thousand feet4 ,its illness made the young sequoia dull to its circumstances1 while the forest giant all the while responded to each vibration of its environment4 ,on some days its sap seemed in easy relation with the air and scents and light raining upon it1 as if a mysterious fluid somewhere in these many elements was making eager its stomata and dissolving the material resistance of the fibres which cut off the tree's vital fluid from the outer air4 ,at other times1 for no clear reason this sympathy between sap and outer world would grow difficult4 ,when ill-health overtakes us1 it closes off from exterior contact the private world in which we exist3 but not completely3 we are not driven to subsist only on our internal vitality4 ,from there does come the impulse or continuity which leads us up to action3 but this energy is reinforced by means existing independently of us1 and yet influencing us to our inmost soul4 ,our passions come to birth within us1 truly3 but their growth and final efflorescence may be due to a variety of vibrations sent from without4 ,our loves and braveries and hates are coloured by powers beyond our will's control4 ,a single sentiment may express itself in divers shapes according to the circumstances in which we move4 ,a passionate outburst may be one in a closed room1 another in a street1 quite different in open country4 ,the giant tree felt its feelings change according to the state of the landscape over which it towered3 just as men are peculiarly liable to be strong or weak1 safe or fearful1 forthcoming or callous according to their attitude1 their stage-setting1 the occult influences which hem them in4 ,otherwise our likes and dislikes1 our joys and sorrows would not move us to different expressions of temper in different places and conditions4 ,the radiant discharges of the sky1 the perfumes of space1 and humane shades of earth abounded3 but the sick tree1 in the balmy evening1 laboured painfully to breathe them in4 ,a link of its armour of defence had slipped1 and about it all the fibres of its being had become displaced4 ,,chapter #aj ,the ,mirror of ,changeless ,time ,the giant tree seemed almost to slumber in the still hazy light of that autumnal afternoon4 ,the sap appeared dispirited1 weighed down from tree-top to root by weariness4 ,for some hundreds of years it had not been working at full pitch4 ,the time-worn trunk bristled with dried lifeless branches in whose veins sap had ceased to flow with life-giving effect3 and in the covering of needles outside the pine could be seen definite signs of age1 even to the extent of sorry bare patches4 ,its life had now gone dull and very distant1 indeed had become little more than a reflection of the old boisterous self4 ,april and ,august no longer budded into splendid vigour in its utricles4 ,for plants as for creatures perceptions become faint with time1 sensations get blurred1 lights grow dim1 till of the life of yesterday nothing but a colourless print remains1 a veiled inconsequent activity4 ,so dull stood the giant on this set ,november day1 as if half-asleep4 ,perhaps it was recalling some wordless memory of its six thousand springs8 ,did its tissues tingle with stored-up impressions8 ,perhaps a confused sense of important events was moving in those physical parts which had most directly received their impact4 ,up one side of the time-worn trunk stretched an enormous scar1 the relic of a gaping wound where once lightning had struck and gashed the tree so that sap ran out to waste4 ,it took the giant more than a hundred years to close that wound1 a period which1 for the tree1 compared well with the month in which our human flesh heals up3 since time has no beginning nor ending1 is neither long nor short1 has no halting-places and never changes3 its duration is relative to the life of the things which are its vehicle1 and expresses itself only in them4 ,accordingly the giant's decay1 in terms1 was like our own4 ,it might last for centuries1 during which the weakness and partial inertia of the tree would persist3 whereas the decay of man is completed in fifteen or twenty years4 ,yet declines1 like lives1 in perspective will be seen to have differed only in degree4 ,when man and tree have ceased to exist their respective courses will be summed up in epochs1 short for the one and long for the other1 but of the same category and as easily tabulated3--for past events all fall into order since they exist only as memories1 without the qualities of action which distinguished them in fact4 ,in retrospect fifty years are like six centuries1 a year of the past scarcely longer than a charged dragging minute of the present4 ,let us imagine that the sequoia1 on this misty autumn afternoon was recalling its memories4 ,it could a little titillate its cells by remembering those uncounted days1 sunny or overcast1 those storm-stricken or magical nights1 those sharp or restful dawns4 ,its six thousand years of memory would be to the tree what his sixty years are to an aged man1 for in memory and dream we have two means which smooth away the unlike things in time1 and give to it1 for one looking backward1 an equality which active nature hardly possesses4 ,a dream-second or a second in memory may be a century as easily as a year3 just as actions which have taken thousands of years to complete may finally have the same contour as little events of an hour4 ,our eyes can enclose in their fixed impartial frame a huge landscape or a tiny plot of space4 ,what is passed has no existence except in memory3 while as for time--we carry it within ourselves1 and pay it out slowly or fast 7or unconsciously7 according to whether we are busy or interested or indifferent4 ,hours are elastic periods1 which expand or contract according to the attention we pay them1 and it is our ideas and our passions which mark them off round the face of our days4 ,time may be imaged as a mirror1 a confused mirror across whose impassive face tens of thousands of scenes chase each other in a mazy dance3 for in it are reflected the innumerable and never-closing consequences of all action1 with all the lights1 all the shadows1 all the extent and motions of the universe4 ,the mirror itself is changeless1 and the semblance of movement lies in the reflection1 in that endless rout of fleeting images whose transience is to their glass as our little moment to eternity4 ,our utmost capacity is to project a thought-ray from our place and instant of existence back into the night which hides our coming1 or forward to the night which waits our going--rays whose imagined courses towards the poles of the infinite we cannot follow even in thought4 ,yet they are our only links with past and future1 those two names which together spell eternity3 the future a past not yet achieved1 and the past a future left behind4 ,such would have been the thoughts of the sequoia 7had it been able to think like us7 on this chill ,november day1 as it stood there by the grove of its sons and grandsons1 the derived pine-trees which had sprung up about it1 yet had not1 even the greatest of them1 reached to half its height3 and something of the same train of thought might have been started by the sight of the neighbouring forest1 now in its twentieth generation4 ,these other trees had passed from youth to maturity1 and then grown old and died1 changing their promise into performance1 and at last becoming a mere memory2 and each stage of their lives1 each tree at every age was to be seen reflected in the impassive glass of time1 which kept of them no record nor trace1 but preserved itself intact against them1 as against all phases of the universe that had been1 that was1 that ever would be4 ,years1 hours1 minutes and moments are not children of ,time1 but circumstance made visible in some one or something4 ,only dreams seem able to assert themselves beyond the face of time's unchanging mirror4 ,they shine and register1 wheel and flit in the darkling mist of eternity1 with something of its power to embrace ons and seconds alike4 ,like eternity too they harmonize and arrange the great things of the universe with the least1 with things so small that they leave no mark even in the cloud-confines of the immaterial3 and again like eternity they have no beginning and no end1 and so convey something of the incommunicable character of chaos4 ,thus in that lifeless ,november the giant seemed lost in a white trance4 ,if we are vivid in springtime1 in autumn we wish for sleep and dreams4 ,a vagueness is the nature of the falling year4 ,up above1 in space1 great deep clouds expanded gradually4 ,they dragged themselves along in languor1 while their slow shadows darkened the moist earth and climbed the stripped branches of the giant pine4 ,in this misty autumnal afternoon against its sad background all movement seemed slack4 ,a formless but dreamy instinct seemed implicit in animals and plants and things4 ,the minutes ticked off lazily in the unearthly gleaming half-light1 in this soft and yet magical atmosphere above which the giant seemed to hang its head in reverie4 ,its relaxed needles1 weeping boughs and lined rugged trunk made up a mournful-seeming disappointed whole4 ,there was not a breath nor a whisper in the air4 ,every shape1 every colour1 every scent1 each withering blade of grass supine on the earth1 each pebble on the plain1 each ripple of light or trembling shadow seemed to give off a similar emanation1 a dull slow tonelessness which permeated the toneless air1 above1 below1 about4 ,in one huge fissure of the bole slept a bear1 made torpid by the close thick weather4 ,on the ground near the foot of the tree in a tuft of dried grass a dog was sleeping1 the dim gaze of its half-open eyes veiled and turned inward4 ,beside it on a raised turf sat a great insect1 the hardly visible vibration of whose wings seemed pensive too4 ,farther away1 but within sight from the tree-top1 stood a hut whose people lay silently watching the great clouds pass4 ,they also were dreaming or thinking1 allowing the whims of the spirit born of this declining season to play over what had been or what yet might be4 ,it would seem as though rare influences of all that is incomprehensible and infinite in space1 of the chaotic and inconceivable in time1 were sometimes allowed to echo down upon things alive and things lifeless1 and to swing them in a general and harmonious way4 ,nature moves on for ever1 sleeplessly and untiringly1 but from time to time the past seems to bode forward in brief uncertain fashion1 casting lights and shadows across the loom of the present4 ,the adamant ,now may keep no trace of the dead ,then1 but the ripples of the past none the less persist in ever-failing widening rings1 which pass out into the abyss as ghost-memories3 and these1 falling sometimes upon the bark of a tree1 or upon the nature of a man1 or the mind of a dog1 or into a sea or a perfume or the half-light of a dewy evening1 evoke dreams and clothe the formless with apparent form that it may have relation with material men and things4 ,,chapter #aa ,the ,wheel of ,life ,lived ,time then is not to be divided into centuries and hours and minutes3 but just as each atom figures a world in itself1 so each moment is an eternity1 one link in an endless chain which binds the remotest past to the remotest future4 ,time's mirror may look with changeless face upon the tens of thousands of events which defile before it and pass away leaving no mark2--but that is not to say that these events are without issue1 since their consequences ripple out into space for ever and ever4 ,what has happened never wholly ceases to happen4 ,to mankind a sentiment of it may return in many forms--in a snatch of music1 in a perfume1 in some subtle vibration or illumination of the atmosphere--and these returns are authentic parcels of the original moment1 for time is to be divorced neither from material nor immaterial things4 ,this ,present1 which to us will so soon be ,past1 keeps1 as it flies1 something of its true essence1 and will revive its influence a year1 a century1 thousands of centuries later1 in some scent or sound1 or unforeseen collocation of circumstance4 ,this continuing process gives us our only approach to the conception of eternity1 for there could be no endless time if the hours lived only once and for all1 and then died irremediably4 ,seconds which have their passage grow enriched in its course and cease1 only to revive in a new form1 after the same fashion as ourselves who1 when death has resolved us1 will live again in other combinations of our elements1 no particle of which can be lost in space or time4 ,each second comprehends eternity1 as each atom the infinite1 and the course of all that is in the universe is rotary1 an orbit constant as those of stars or of electrons4 ,everything wheels about space in circles2 and probably movement in time is also circular3 so that when we find ourselves strangely imagining things which have been1 or things which may sometime be1 we can explain ourselves to ourselves with the reflection that our momentary path has doubtless that second crossed the emanations of some instant fully lived by another1 long ago4 ,the sensation that we have already seen or lived or heard something is similarly explained4 ,each active moment is an amalgam of sentiments and wills and multiple elements which split apart as soon as the purpose is achieved4 ,the moments of its duration then scatter through space and time1 taking with them remains of their charged sounds1 colours1 and scents1 with atmospheres of joy or sadness not fully perceptible by our limited senses1 but certainly to be opined1 and almost to be felt4 ,we may pursue this train of thought a little farther1 and be prepared to accept that certain places derive a special atmosphere from the events of which they have been the setting1 and may preserve it indefinitely4 ,we are often sensible of particular associations which hang about such and such a feature3 one place may instil terror1 and others peace1 disquietude1 mystery1 or love1 without any apparent quality in their disposition to account for the possession of such power4 ,the reason is that the events or thoughts or actions of which they have been the scene have left traces within the four walls of the room1 in the branches of the tree1 or in the various features of the place4 ,in fact1 the seconds of old time are yet living there1 loaded with old association1 and as they whirl and vibrate they sensitize us with their invisible rays4 ,if we were endowed with new faculties1 sensitive to such influences as now escape us1 and with them were able to apprehend and analyse these scattered fragments of the past1 these waifs of dead adventures1 then we might be able to reconstruct the deeds and lives and deaths1 all the unplumbed combinations of circumstance in the cities or countries of our passage4 ,this invisible swarm of seconds which have been hems us about1 wherever and whenever we go1 with its traces of suffering and of delight1 of unrest1 of clashing1 of colour3 for the emanations of our souls 7like those of the souls of things7 are heavy with various essences which may grow faint1 but never altogether perish4 ,in this dead ,november air a soft musical murmur seemed to hang round the giant tree1 as if it were mourning its old age and sadness4 ,in this autumnal dreaminess the tree was living again some of its passed life1 hearing the times and moments thronging by1 contrasting 7even in its least fibre7 the brilliancy of yesterday with the sadness of the failing present4 ,the numberless radiations of the air which for centuries had made florid its stem seemed to-day to renew about it their health-giving vibrations4 ,this dust of time1 the elements of old situations great and small1 had come from near or far as the case was3 perhaps from the beginning of things in the depths of the abyss4 ,to-morrow1 when the great tree would be no more1 it might affect other forms1 and make fertile other existences4 ,we go abroad in a throng of atoms1 the basic materials of distant and diverse forms of life4 ,sometimes they breathe upon us1 sometimes we hear them1 sometimes we see them4 ,at other times they move us to love or hope or fear1 melt us to tenderness1 brace us to deep efforts1 or daze us with weird portents4 ,to this vagabond star-dust we can ascribe a sometime fit of passion or wrath1 of madness or joy4 ,the world about us is all peopled with these spirit-mists4 ,we live red moments and white moments1 odorous or musical moments1 moments of pain or love1 brief or slow1 loud or peaceful4 ,space1 to repeat1 builds up nature out of its own substance3 and likewise unchanging time makes use of its own essence to assemble and arrange and fix the order of events4 ,evening came down wan and weeping over the uncertain scene4 ,the mist thickened into clouds like smoke1 whilst silence and a baseless lethargy soaked through the sluggish air4 ,the giant tree loomed straight and huge in the twilight1 its form as ever1 its colours those which it had assumed on so many evenings4 ,neither shape nor appearance was different from those with which it had fronted the autumns of many years1 and their intricate pallors2 but never before had it looked so desolate in the desolate splendour of its setting4 ,its sadness was as patent as the sadness of the landscape3 and since neither the content nor the surface of this ,november gloaming appeared different from those of past autumns the source of this changed feeling had to be searched for4 ,there was no motion in the tree1 nor stirring of a blade of grass1 nor strange gleam through the fog2 nor did the chill air feel endued with a particular quality3 yet this depression over the world was true and heavy1 weighing down all spirits and things from some unknown direction1 and by imperceptible means4 ,it could only have been the product of secret universal influences vibrating in space as a cloud of invisible particles able to link time to matter1 as dreams to reality4 ,the giant was weary1 the giant was sick3 and the mysterious sorrow of its pain was diffused about it like an odour4 ,the low clouds continued to collect together1 darkening with their purple masses the violet striations of the unwholesome sky4 ,the still country-side was suddenly stirred by a faint shudder4 ,it was that the sun had set4 ,the first approach of evening yet held relics of the light of day3 and through it came another sudden tremor1 which awoke the slumbering air1 and the inert earth1 the pale grass1 the scattered pebbles in the plain1 the roosting birds1 the beasts in their dens men in their houses1 and insects in their inmost hiding-places4 ,the pine-tree in turn felt this invisible convulsion penetrate strangely from its crest to its roots4 ,the convulsion was invisible1 indefinable1 and immense1 and yet its cause seemed wholly hidden4 ,what was this swarm of vivified instants 7lived perhaps millions of years ago7 which had drifted into the district of the giant pine8 ,how far had they come1 these fulfilled seconds1 whose course had once been run8 ,were they the time- and space-enfeebled echo of a cataclysm in some unknown world8 7when8 and where87 or the travail of a blind sun lost in space1 yet casting its ominous enigmatic messages across the worlds8 ,these very real astral influences1 active upon men and also upon all that exists1 are understood by us usually in an unworthy and insufficient degree4 ,it is admitted that we are at times bound by the forces of distant heavenly bodies1 but this can hardly be as individuals1 nor can their waves1 when they sway us1 be sent forth expressly on our petty account4 ,we must not be so simple as to think that the existence of any one among us can interest or engross the whole activity of a sphere or that its labouring is to make smooth the way of a single man4 ,we feel its influence when our path crosses the direction of its discharged waves2 but all beings1 all plants1 hills1 peoples1 countries in the same case are influenced at the same time as ourselves1 and in a like fashion4 ,this may explain why associations of things are sometimes swayed to a common feeling or purpose by invisible means4 ,we often note that a sense of gaiety or of suffering1 of liveliness or of resignation1 of calm or disquietude imposes itself on us and on our neighbours1 quite independently of our own state of mind4 ,both animate and inanimate things are subject to such changes of state1 which may last a long or a short time1 may be restricted or general1 but which generally lead their objects in an undesigned direction4 ,such forms have probably played a wide and yet undetected part in the history of mankind1 and also in the physical history of the globe3 they may account for some of our unexpected and abrupt departures from the usual manner1 for the irregular impulses which make us commit acts foreign to our normal will and nature4 ,so that the unknown1 into which pass our dead acts and ideas1 may itself conceal also the sources of our resolutions and of our performances4 ,the evening closed in yet more1 its clouds slowly veiling the heavens1 while the mists thickened1 and covered up the ground3 yet the unnameable trouble1 which so mysteriously gripped the region1 had faded as mysteriously as it had come4 ,unchanged1 in its surrounding silence and circumstances stood the giant1 serene once more4 ,true it was still tired1 and the sap in its veins felt enfeebled by advancing age2 but the sense of misery and desolation just now weighing upon it had been lifted4 ,the dismal pomp of invisible minutes of grief had wended its way past1 invisibly4 ,these sad1 dark1 disaster-laden minutes--from what black event1 and whence had they been derived8 ,what incalculable journey had they made8 and whither would their uncontrolled and endless course next tend8 ,and the great tree itself1 standing there so stiff under that autumn sky1 so remote from ours--what can have been these detached moments of its life and being which come from its stem to interest us1 to bring to our lamp-lighted room the ghosts of its joy and the shades of its pain8 ,what were these acts1 these enjoyed moments of the giant's life1 that they can so float about us1 murmur to us1 hold our interest1 that even to our dreams come memories and broken incidents of what it was8 that as the tale of its death draws near to be told1 we feel grief for that huge ruddy trunk8 ,perhaps it is because the thoughts which take wing from our souls1 as from the souls of things1 are so many parcels of vital essence1 which pass over the face of the mirror of changeless time1 and look into it and are pictured there1 and then break up and rearrange themselves1 but never die4 ,,chapter #ab ,when the ,wood-,dust floated in the ,air ,whilst the ,august sun was pouring its clear warm rays from the blue heavens upon the world1 a fine wood-powder continued to rain down from all the internal cavities of the giant's trunk1 in a reddish dust which lay deep upon the roots4 ,the tree's substance had been so falling away for centuries1 with every now and then a larger dilapidation when some great cavity formed itself within its thickness3 while on the outside the harsh bark as slowly decayed4 ,beneath the soil in the still-kindly darkness of the earth's heart the roots1 regretting their failed vivacity1 were now resigned to grow more dry and twisted and inert day by day1 powerless any more to suck life-giving nourishment from their ground4 ,on the surface of the earth the eternal counter-change of life and death proceeded4 ,thousands of births1 both plant and animal1 occurred1 to compensate for the thousands of deaths1 the wheel of life impartially grinding out change or creation or destructiveness4 ,it was now summer4 ,the still air was elastic and alive1 and transmitted a shining lightness to the world4 ,all was green and gay and content1 serene as the unflecked sky and the splendid sun4 ,girt about with this joyous and pellucid atmosphere stood the giant1 tall as ever1 but contrasting more sharply against its pure keenness4 ,the huge embrace1 vivid and blue and green1 in which heaven held earth1 seemed almost violent in opposition to the spirit of the tree1 whose dead branches and scarred trunk and weary roots marked a heavy despondency4 ,sorrow in spring and summer is quite unlike sorrow in autumn or winter4 ,when the year dies the current of life is dying too1 whereas in spring-time the new sharp vigour of life makes any sadness seem doubly desolate4 ,the warm sun and renewal of activity in animals and plants1 the liveliness of those about us intensify our grief1 which1 when autumn comes1 is in keeping with the common tendency of nature1 and becomes moderate1 soothed by the absence of joy in others4 ,apposition is the greatest tonic of colours1 as analogy clears the vision3 accordingly this day of fairest summer1 with its luxuriant flowers and plants about which the bees were humming in the sunshine so that nature seemed to sing softly to itself in the jocund air and the universal gladness made the far hills come together for joy1 this day made prominent the infinite desolation of the giant's aspect4 ,the gold of the sunlight was gilding the singing ripples of the water1 the birds were flinging their loudest notes upon the velvet air1 the wild beasts were supine with excess of well-being1 the plants were burgeoning and swelling with sap in the afflatus of their perfumes3 but the sequoia1 alone1 was bitten through and compassed with the bitter smell of old age1 and felt life draw back from its insensitive branches1 from its ruined trunk1 from its hidden roots1 now lifeless and impassive among the former fertilizing benefits of the juices underground4 ,the trees near-by were preening themselves in the rain of sun-starts1 shuddering with the force of the new waves of life pumped into them from the teeming earth4 ,the wind thrilled through their branches and all nature came together in that healthy rush of new life1 which had once been common also to the giant tree4 ,once6 for now the inside of its trunk was powdered thick with that rain of fine red wood-dust1 falling ever more fast towards the tree's ruin4 ,yet the outline of the tree against the clear1 thin sky appeared unchanged4 ,at its very head1 the topmost twig still bore green and lustrous pine-needles4 ,the remaining life of the sequoia had taken refuge and concentrated itself there1 in those few square inches of supple wood and fluid sap4 ,from the first days of spring the tree had seemed to live wholly for this last branch1 which was linked directly with a very fine tap root burrowing deep underground4 ,the only pulse of life in the tree was here1 in the circulation of these few drops of sap between head and foot4 ,breath had slowly abandoned the rest of the tree1 to hover hazardous and trembling for a weak while between the labouring root and the little green twig lost away up there in the blue4 ,the tree's entire intention seemed now to lie in this last twig1 to the exclusion of any thought of the huge dead mass between4 ,one might say almost that it tried to ignore all the decay1 after the fashion of other failing lives4 ,this solitary green branch on the inert bole was like the quivering wing-case of a crushed insect1 or the childish and petty busyness of an old man near the grave4 ,everybody can recall the incomprehensible eagerness of some dying soul to recollect a strayed trifle1 as if repose of mind depended on its being put straight3 or that other unfortunate on his sick bed who seemed to lose sense of the beating wings of death in listening to the petty ticking of a newly mended watch4 ,childhood1 prime and age have ambitions and goals to suit their strengths1 so that the complex and magnificent dreams of youth grow pale and few as life dims in us4 ,old men have small hopes and mean activity1 not because they are weary and sick of life1 but because life is abandoning them3 and at the final moment1 when life leaves us altogether1 its last feeblest trace may be a trivial thought which we try to fix1 a futile wish we long to satisfy1 a foolish interest4 ,this last living branch of the giant tree may prefigure the moment when the last inhabitants of our globe will cling to its last habitable portion while all the rest of it is frozen in an eternal winter1 or when the like fate overtakes the last habitable planet of our sky4 ,life which is made by inches departs by inches3 in those sudden cases of apparent and violent destruction it is only that the falling curve dips downward more fast4 ,this we must consider not as a special act of nature1 but as an ultimate effect of life moving towards that new arrangement which is called death4 ,since everything which exists1 small or great1 is compounded of various elements 7an interaction of multiple energies71 so it is logical that life should take hold of its matter piece-meal1 and relinquish it1 when the time comes1 also piecemeal4 ,in this fashion the internal decomposition of the pine-tree proceeded4 ,slowly its substance crumbled away to dust1 amidst the close smell of age and decay4 ,tremors of dissolution began to pass through the giant4 ,dull creakings ran up and down the trunk4 ,its sorry boughs quivered with a thin resonance1 while deep-buried in the soil its roots contracted in agony4 ,a narrow crack opened in the wood just above ground level1 and gradually spread round the trunk1 growing deeper as it went3 while the red tree-dust trickled out through every hollowed place and floated in the air as a fine cloud1 proof of dry rot and presage of coming death4 ,still1 at the very crest there shone out golden in the sunlight that last living branch1 fresh and shining in all its needles4 ,the gracious summer had fortified all life upon earth4 ,from a hill far away there came a waft of air1 which loaded itself on its passage with the emanations of plain and field and wood1 till it reached the district of the tree4 ,its warm soft breath kissed the giant gently1 just waving the little green twig up aloft1 and then passed on1 as though towards an endless series of new scenes and adventures4 ,yet it was early checked4 ,a line of trees1 making a wall with their interwoven branches1 repulsed it1 flung it back with a new impulse4 ,it became a gust1 sweeping along the ground-level1 raising a cloud of leaves and dust and the dried powder of decomposed wood about the base of the sequoia1 into whose fissured trunk it blew strongly4 ,the tree shuddered1 spiral tremors running up its length and down again1 rather as the invigorating sap had once run up and down4 ,at the foot of the tree1 where the circular crack was1 these tremors were stayed4 ,they ran together1 reinforced each other1 swelled into lateral shocks4 ,a deep low warning sounded in the body of the wood1 and echoed outside4 ,for a little the huge shape shivered in the liquid air1 oscillating to right and left1 while the tiny plume of green at its summit described vivid curves against the blueness of the sky4 ,then simply1 powerfully1 inevitably1 as in all natural decisions1 came a loud rending like the last cry of an agonizing spirit1 and the immense pillar bowed down and fell upon the earth1 which shook under the weight1 while the sky1 suddenly made vacant of such bulk1 seemed to leap up as the giant fell4 ,thick clouds of ruddy dust rose widely into the air1 filling it with the damp odour of decay1 while the bottom of the trunk feathered out in splinters1 as the dried roots1 so long hidden from the day1 were torn out from both ground and wood4 ,more than seven thousand years ago a heedless puff of wind had cast a sequoia seed upon the fertile earth3 and now another puff had broken down its tree4 ,for more than seventy centuries the forest giant had had its part in this life which we share1 and its course 7like ours1 while they endure7 had run curving through time and space till its circle was completed1 a perfect round1 as all life's movements are1 and will be everywhere and evermore4 ,its very age was inscribed in concentric circles in the thickness of its trunk4 ,the seasons1 in their repeated going and coming1 had given the impression of a slowly turning wheel1 like the terrene revolution or the sun's4 ,the sequoia1 a cylinder in core1 a cone in shape1 had lived amongst fellow-curves4 ,the rounded stars journey in their elliptical orbits1 and the electrons likewise in their infinite degree4 ,this unchanging changeless time rounds all things in their span4 ,the hours encompass us1 described upon their dial2 and even contrasts at the last run together1 made to coincide by the slow bending of every line of form4 ,infinity1 if that be the nature of the universe1 causes to meet all movement when its arc of direction is completed1 and the course of time too seems circular1 the rolling of a wheel4 ,can chaos1 the abyss itself1 be concentric1 after the likeness of everything with which its halls are peopled8 ,suppose that an eagle1 piercing high beyond our sight in the blue vault of heaven1 had seen the giant fall4 ,it would have thought the event and the object petty1 across the vast distance4 ,one near-by would have been moved by the greatness of the victim4 ,the greatness and the littleness of things thus seem to depend upon the point of view--a trite1 daily1 observation1 no doubt1 but so is life itself to us4 ,big and little--is it not possible that proportions get their value only subjectively1 and that in space they rank less important than to our minds8 ,this concept of relativity1 producing itself in everlasting stages across the horizon of our intelligence--may it not be linked with that other law of comparison1 the relation of one dimension to another1 which ensures something bigger than any object1 however big1 and something smaller than the almost infinitely small8 ,anyhow1 measured by human standards1 the trunk of the dying giant as it lay there on the ground was huge4 ,the wind was still rustling in its branches1 though the air about them was made dense with wood-dust now4 ,it used to be1 to our mind1 an immense tree 444 and soon it will be nothing4 ,soon8 ,before the sequoia has given back to space the elements of which it was made1 its carcass will have to rot for hundreds or thousands of years4 ,it takes so long for all the constituents of such a tree to be resolved1 for the oxygen to go back to oxygen1 for the carbon to re-become carbon1 the liquid to turn again into liquid4 ,yet this lapse of time1 when the last trace of the tree has ceased to be1 will have been as a second4 ,to our fallibility it has seemed long1 but eternity1 which will bring the ultimate and certain destruction of all matter1 recks not of a few thousand centuries4 ,when it was alive the forest giant harboured in its branches thousands of bodies of insects4 ,some were crushed violently to dust by accidents4 ,some perished merely by lapse of time1 but all in the end came to nothing3 for eternity reduces everything to the same value1 sooner or later--reduces them all to nothing4 ,our thousands of lives1 magnificent or sordid1 long or short1 great or small1 as they happen to be on earth1 leave no mark in space and time4 ,the glory or the shame of what has been bears value and meaning only in our fitful solitary dreams4 ,should we consider them as having never existed--all these things which have had life and have1 under the law1 returned to the chaos which called them forth--now only as the dust of forces and of time8 ,the elements remain eternally unchanged1 however protean their assumed shapes3 perhaps what we term life and death are only their incidental phases4 ,,chapter #ac ,what is called ,death ,the forest giant now lay low in the sunlight waiting the return of its substances to their kindred elements of time or space4 ,for the moment the tree was dead1 since it kept yet its living shape2 but when nothing of it remained recognizable1 it would be as if it had never been4 ,long and short lives1 rich and poor lives1 are all made equal at the moment when they have ended4 ,like the mass of beings and plants and things1 our tree found rest in death4 ,after so many and with so many we ask anxiously1 ,what is this ,death8 a sempiternal1 unanswered1 fresh and vital question4 ,no one has yet solved it1 and probably no one will1 for we cannot experience death and retain our power to register its effects4 ,sometimes we can feel it coming near1 or imagine we do1 and at that time may try to describe its onset2 but such an experience has nothing in common with veritable death4 ,to know it1 and to impart our knowledge of it to others1 would entail our having control of our faculties1 whereas death's first act is to deprive us of just that control4 ,how much has been said and thought and written about death6 ,and without effect4 ,we should make up our minds that nothing is to be added to what we already know about it4 ,we continually strain to realize the flavour of death by heaping up a confused mass of ideas1 by strange and inordinate imaginings1 by deliberately forcing our thought and dealing to a point beyond control4 ,yet these are not means and ways by which to learn2 for in our wildest dreams1 in our most fearful phantasies1 or strangest visions1 in all that is unfamiliar1 runs the thread of life4 ,we can have no dreams or hallucinations or inventions1 born of true imagination or of a fit of madness1 unless life give them us--and so how can they hold an idea or sense of death8 ,and this is why we will never1 in anticipation1 taste death4 ,we cannot even distinguish and analyse for ourselves the fashion in which death will some day bear us away from life4 ,death is the non-existent1 made not out of silence 7which noise explains71 nor out of darkness 7which light would explain71 but out of something inconceivably absolute4 ,sleep implies an awakening1 dreams imply the powers of seeing1 thinking1 hearing1 inertness implies the power of movement2 so that nothing in our range of experience1 from complete peace to utter terror1 can plant in us a true sense of death1 and probably no man1 to the end of the world1 will ever be able to explain it in terms of others' deaths or of his own4 ,when our spirit has departed 7that is1 when the bond between the secret and innumerable forces whose continued contact makes our life is at last unloosed71 we are only vague shapes in deliquescence4 ,the dead keep nothing of their ancient character4 ,what had been their life is submerged in the infinite whole1 as myriads of particles of varying elements4 ,in nature alone is the power to dispose of these dispersed and impalpable essences2 so it is finally impossible that an entity such as our present should ever again come together and act after our death4 ,we are1 and we will cease to be3 that much is certain2 but what we will be can never be told4 ,in some purple and grey evening of the closing year1 one of those pale hours which seem to dissolve away our flesh that our spirit may grow more reinforced in itself1 we can sit and dream of those who were dear to us1 whom life has left so that they are no more found4 ,with far-away eyes and hearts heavy with memories we remember our dead1 how brilliant their faces1 how dear their voices1 how moving their presences once were to us3 and from memories so harrowing we have not wracking despair and agony1 but only pitying tears1 which seem inadequate as issue of the certainty that we will never see again those looks nor hear those voices nor feel those presences4 ,these dead were all in all to us1 and yet they have gone without trace left either for us or for the world4 ,and why does our reason not swoon in a nerve-shattering flood of horror when it sees the deaths of people whom we loved1 or whom we have merely seen doing and moving1 people who have pleased us or hurt us1 whose warm hands 7full and trembling with life7 have touched ours1 whose glances have met our own2 why are we not terrified as we stand by at their supreme moment when life and death meet1 and a world in the winking of an eye is reduced to nothing8 ,and when we have lost our familiar friends1 how can we go on living1 and talking8 how can we take pleasure in things or be sorry1 in our usual fashion8 ,and how think of them after they have gone1 with such calm regret and resignation1 whereas it was a frenzied grief1 touching madness1 which the anticipation of their future deaths evoked in us8 ,the answer to these questions is that the knowledge how we must ourselves some day die is always stirring in us1 forms part of our flesh and blood1 moves in our nerves1 and finds our own inevitable destined end prefigured in each death of those about us4 ,we say1 or rather we feel obscurely1 that what is happening to them will some day happen to us1 when the fatal time comes for us to pay this dread tribute which they are paying4 ,perhaps it is the same current of ideas1 which makes collective disaster1 such as war or pestilence1 less frightful to us than the tragedies of individuals4 ,the consciousness that we are ourselves exposed to such perils reduces our commiseration1 not out of egotism 7as is commonly thought71 but from a sense that we too will bear our part in the eventual expiation4 ,the idea that in our turn we will suffer this softens in some odd way our dread of the inevitable and the distress we might feel at another's pitiable situation4 ,the younger sequoia trees which had survived the greatest of their family would flourish for a long while yet1 and enjoy the vigour of their cool fragrant sap2 but the fall of the giant would be theirs in the end4 ,they would go brittle and inert before the fatal hour4 ,neither the light of day1 nor warmth1 nor the kindly earth would any more be profitable to them4 ,their substance would dissolve infallibly into a fine red dust1 smelling mournfully of age4 ,only time and space1 of all the universe1 remain for ever changeless4 ,there was a bustle of ants in the heavy dust of the decaying wood1 up and down the fallen trunk of the giant tree1 now flecked with alternate bars of light and shade4 ,here as elsewhere life and death succeeded one another4 ,flowers bloom as flowers fade1 creatures are born as others die1 fresh springs rise up here as rivers grow dry elsewhere1 crystals are formed as others split3 and all the while earth goes forward towards its frozen fate4 ,in high heaven the wheeling stars prepare themselves to receive life1 or to grow desolate2 all is in flux1 transforms itself1 repeats itself1 dies3 even what seems to us most assured and everlasting4 ,while we ourselves1 atoms of the universe1 endure our sentence of imprisonment in life according to inexorable law1 until the term of death4 ,in such a chaos1 where1 amidst millions of clashing forces1 millions of destinies are being worked out1 what can be the purpose of the all-seeing ,eye8 what inconceivable end has ,he designed for the living and for the dead1 for the stars1 for all creation8 ,our souls and bodies1 our births and goings-out1 the details and the wholes1 what is the final inexpressible combination which will resolve them all8 whither does the huge inexplicable movement tend8 ,in face of such a problem let us remember how we mitigate our terror by being able to take ourselves and our puny acts seriously4 ,they are so small compared with the constellations of the stars1 and yet they absorb us4 ,we are able to laugh and cry1 to love and hate1 in our narrow bounds1 forgetting for the while the agony of the unknown which encompasses us1 and forgetting to ask the how and why1 the purpose of each act of life1 its relation to the universe4 ,we are able to exist by and according to the impulses of our own flesh and spirit1 as each species exists according to the particular measure and direction of its means4 ,the forest giant also had its time4 ,a pine-seed after manifold adventures transformed itself1 in a course of admirable permutations1 into a mighty tree for more than seventy centuries4 ,yet its hour struck3 and in its fate can be read the fates of all created things1 after due allowance has been made for variety in age and kind and size4 ,the giant at last lay in peace upon the fertile ground1 having had its life1 like us1 and like us having nothing thereafter in eternity or in the infinite3 though while it lived it obeyed the nature of its kind1 and all powers in earth and heaven seemed leagued in its support4 ,so we do all1 while we exist4 ,in the small circle which it is happiness for us to fill1 we repeat the experience of those who have gone before2 and in the breathing air1 in the shining light1 the dancing heat1 the darkening shadow1 in the rhythm of the friendly world we carry through to the end the courses laid down for us4 ,and vainly do we seek to learn not merely whence we come and whither we go1 but what and why we are1 while we exist4 ,,chapter #ad ,the ,theory of ,eternal ,sleeplessness ,what can chaos be but the mass of elements not yet conjoined with those other atoms which have been embodied and which have returned to the mass8 ,the fallen tree was now sunken in an endless sleep4 ,the rays of the sun playing over its ruined trunk gradually absorbed its colours4 ,the discoloured redness of its substance1 the yellow of its rotted dust1 the fresh green of its last shoots slowly faded1 while the winds took away its antique smell and the blue atmosphere re-incorporated the oxygen1 the carbon1 and the last elements of moisture in its wood4 ,finally the whole shape of the former tree disappeared1 so that there remained on earth no visible or tangible trace of its former inhabitant2 though its substance still existed4 ,its component parts could be found in the light and air1 in the clouds1 in a vibration1 a breath1 on a stone1 either in material substances or in invisible radiations4 ,they were the old elements of the sequoia1 exactly as they had been in essence1 though now their forms were so different that they conjured up no memories of the vanished tree4 ,on the analogy it may well be that the solid particles1 the liquids1 the essences which together make up our apparent forms1 have had equally varied incarnations1 have been beautiful or vile1 have been drab or splendid1 have been delicious-smelling1 have encountered a thousand unexpected changes and adventures before they were re-born as us4 ,the energy which moves us1 the matter which gives us substance1 the impulses which excite us1 the dreams which trouble us1 and the occasional mysteries which vibrate in our souls and bodies may come from sources thousands of years old1 and through a myriad phases of existence4 ,in face of these unexplored ramifications of our personality it seems impossible that we should ever be able to tie effect to cause1 or learn the reason of these secret longings of ours1 or of those strange instincts and reactions1 those preferences1 those fears4 ,they come to us from so far1 the forces which order our doings3 and though each element remains intact and unadulterated1 yet signs of the many moments they have passed embodied in various shapes cling to them always1 like fine dust4 ,one wonders whence came the particles which composed the giant tree1 from what previous embodiments1 and into what shapes they reassembled after the pine was dead4 ,what had been green in the tree might be black or transparent when next its elements took visible form4 ,what had made the tree seem solid might be liquid or vapour in the new assemblage4 ,the fragrant pine-fumes might be solid and common next time4 ,common8 ,well1 hardly perhaps1 for there is neither beautiful nor ugly1 noble nor ignoble in the universe4 ,such qualities are conferred upon things by their impact upon our senses4 ,this or that vortex of atoms which to-day gives us exquisite dreams may in a later evolution be some combination utterly hateful to our taste4 ,a process which wounds us to-day may to-morrow bring forth a marvellous constellation of molecules4 ,the indestructible elements whirl unceasing in the universe1 moving from an out-worn structure to a new one1 dissolving and amalgamating without rest till they rejoin the ever-lasting silence--whence they will leap out again to like adventures1 or towards yet unknown variations1 in turn to scatter in a dust of atoms4 ,an embodiment may last for a day or for hundreds of thousands of years2 but its inevitable end is in the chaos of infinity4 ,on the sun-bathed earth an irrefragable peace had at last drowned the ruins of the tree4 ,with its death one particular adventure in creation was run4 ,the forces which had made it tangible would continue to function1 but their specific combination as a pine-tree was ended for ever4 ,the forest giant henceforward would be as before its birth--a part of the body of eternal nature4 ,around it the rhythm of the world would flow1 neither faster nor slower than of old1 with light and shadow1 ice and fire1 birth and death1 all things just as before1 but not it3 these similar conditions cannot be of this tree's atoms1 nor partakers of its life1 nor a union of its elements4 ,its race was run3 as in this world all things must some while end4 ,the tree with the ruddy trunk and green needles was dead3 and they are dead1 or will die1 those insects with the gaudy wing-cases1 the bright-scaled fish1 the downy birds1 the sharp-fanged animals1 proud mankind1 diamonds of the purest water1 black carbon1 seas1 mountains1 world and suns4 ,the eternal universal is built up of perishable parts1 and our blind career is only a succession of incidents like or unlike1 a drawn-out flicker of beginnings and endings1 a steady stream of sensations1 of bubbles swelling up and bursting1 one single life made up of a myriad lives4 ,they beat and flow and scatter1 to be re-born after each change4 ,we are all ephemeral in terms of our allotted situation1 and eternal in terms of the universe4 ,everything which is still1 as everything which moves about us1 is no more than a whirl of situations constantly made and unmade3 and so our substances1 those which now make up ourselves1 will infallibly scatter us some day4 ,elements seem to grow tired at last of being confined in one special shape1 to be weary of being so long a man1 a stone1 a river1 a fire4 ,their weariness is ours1 in sum4 ,we feel vigorous or weak1 joyful or sad1 perturbed or resigned according to the prosperity of our cells3 and we all1 whatever our age and health1 encounter hours in which1 without reason given1 our whole being longs for annihilation4 ,at other times--in common experience it happens often at that hour when lamps should be lit--there swells up in us an indeterminate wish to be other than we are3 and our flesh goes dead1 our hearts cold1 our heads empty of desire4 ,may this not be our dissatisfied elements1 desirous of change1 speaking within us8 ,and the often-just premonitions of death which come to men1 how explain them other than as the stirring of our elements quickened by radiations from the unknown8 ,the trouble of those stricken by a sudden and mortal fate1 their inexplicable distress1 the panic-stricken flock of teeming thoughts vainly seeking escape in their shadowy subconsciousness--all this morbid poignant possessed state must be due to our cells' foreknowledge that shortly their architecture will be changed4 ,our independent life puts no obstacle in the way of that universal ebb and flow1 which sets through us and subjects us to the same law of eternal change which rules the rest of chaos4 ,for these reasons the close of a career should not be to us a melancholy sight4 ,to be born1 to exist1 to die should seem simple1 natural1 unchangeable things1 only shades of difference even when considered to the farthest obscurity of their never-ending course4 ,but to be eternal1 there is a vision which exceeds6 ,to be eternal6 ,the universe withstands1 unmoved1 the passing of trees and beings and things4 ,in its season everything must defile before the mirror of changeless time4 ,plants in their fading go the way of suns as they grow cold1 of dreams as they pass on waking1 of an insect as it perishes4 ,in the imperishable universe things are born only to die4 ,we1 as atoms of the stream of life1 can stiffen ourselves with the knowledge that we suffer only the common fate of all created things2 that the same fate rules both material and spiritual things1 men and stars following one curve in their careers2 and that in nature no situation can endure unaltered4 ,as we dwell on it1 the idea of being eternal becomes impossible to our spirits4 ,to be infinitely active for ever1 what a prospect of overwhelming sameness6 ,perpetual life would be for us no less than a never-ending sleeplessness4 ,we would have to endure with a constant endurance of constant circumstances1 while others about us were born and died1 while plants grew green and withered1 whilst the rivers ran1 and the suns burned themselves out2 we would have to watch the ebb and flow of things1 and the measured flight of hours1 the evolution of form1 the levelling of fine distinction4 ,the same dreams1 the same senses would function1 without ever a stop1 without ever a relieving variation--what a vision of weariness and monotonous despair6 ,like a great wide eye in which were mirrored chaos and its thousand ghostly shapes1 an eye limpid but glassy1 strained and aching with its long stare1 over which it was ordered that no easeful lid might ever close4 ,everlasting life for men an everlasting insomnia8 ,let us call to mind some of those nights when sleep would not visit us1 when open-eyed we gazed into the dark as though it were luminous1 our temples all one ring of ice1 and in our stagnant veins a biding weariness which nothing could relieve4 ,life throbbed in our ears with an unchanging beat4 ,the air about us might be loud with rumour1 or be silent2 there might be a clock ticking1 or a storm raging in the night outside1 but anyhow1 and however our mood1 the sleeplessness always in the end prevailed over all circumstances1 and knotted up the customary arabesques of our sensation into one pattern1 mechanical and terrifying in its regularity4 ,a cold terror would take hold of us--the lucid ordered distraction of severe insomnia--and we would be lost in a passionless despair1 in that desert of opaque oppression which is ultimate fatigue4 ,each cell in us called aloud on sleep1 while our whole being thrummed with the rhythm of life4 ,the entire existence of the aged and the very sick is an unended longing for repose1 and no small part of the agony and horror of a death-bed is this cruel wakefulness which holds the eyes ever on the watch4 ,eternal peace has no terrors for the dying3 but if that necessary nescience was not to follow after1 if their wakefulness was to endure world without end--what then8 ,despite our pains life is sweet1 while it runs within its proper bounds2 but it would be intolerable if it were endless4 ,on this mortal earth the giant tree had passed into its last rest1 leaving the general current of life behind it to continue unchecked4 ,the sequoia1 even if it had had the power1 would not have been sorry no longer to breathe in the odours of the world1 nor feel the sunlight1 nor pump the sap up and down its weather-beaten trunk4 ,at its hour of death it was desiring death1 the great sleep in which lay repose1 with all its strength1 even with its finest stomata1 its inmost grain1 its remotest root2 and if this was the issue of its seven thousand years1 such should be the issue of a dog's corresponding fifteen years1 of a man's seventy years1 of a planet's millions4 ,in the midst of eternity an age is not so long4 ,,conclusion ,within a ,cell ,through all the changing pomp of seasons1 while the sun showered down its yellow rays1 while the rain striped it with grey markings1 and the snow lay heavy and white upon it1 the vision of the tree was present to me1 first as a colossal column1 standing up in heaven1 then as a broken ruin1 prostrate on the ground4 ,as through a light haze ,i have tried to distinguish the splendour of its life1 and the tragedy of its death3 and all this while the blue and green and grey country in which the sequoia lived and died has become in some degree my own country1 a part of me4 ,i grew to love those distant hills1 modulating away to invisibility on some shining day of spring2 ,i learned to feel the sadness of the autumn twilights which made the background of the pine-tree go so pale and lifeless and desolate4 ,i traced at length the slow circulation of the giant's sap1 and became sensitive like the tree to light and shadow1 to all the influences1 exciting or soporific1 of the type of country in which ,i had placed it4 ,nevertheless1 all this creation of a vast landscape1 and the huge form of the tree1 took shape1 endured1 and ended in a tiny space1 one of those imperceptible and secret compartments called cells1 parts of our bodies immeasurable by human wit4 ,outside my window the world was growing feeble in the failing autumn1 but from the white page which ,i slowly darkened with my writing bloomed for my sight a summer scene of green and gold1 where once the giant tree had stood1 but which now was again become clear ground and azure sky3 and ,i told myself how shortly my memory-cell would produce for me a new mind-landscape1 new images1 new sentiments4 ,such dreams1 born within ourselves1 have the vividness of real incidents1 while they last3 to such a degree that it seems questionable whether the physical shocks we undergo and the palpable matter we encounter are really the intensest experiences of our lives4 ,may it not be rather that our sharpest colouring comes from the volatile and obscure matter of our ideas and dreams1 with its rich palette of innumerable shades8 ,only by means of the abstract part of our nature do we commune with the universe4 ,our likes and dislikes1 our delights and despairs are not the issue of our carnal parts1 offspring of our blood and nerves1 except in so far as these are submissive conductors of the hidden reactions of our imagination4 ,a single dream will change the current of our life1 and our actions are the product of the powerful but hidden inner world of our minds4 ,so that it is our imagination which rules our conduct4 ,our physical performance is the reflex of our conception of the deed4 ,our will is the developed image of the dark1 fertile1 capricious1 imperceptible force which we call fancy4 ,we can mingle this fancy in almost material fashion with all the things and beings on our path through life1 so strange in composition is this substance or fluid4 ,everything which is ours1 even our passions1 obey its commands4 ,it can make us chaste or ardent1 will purify our flesh in the presence of our sisters1 and inflame the same matter when our thoughts turn concupiscently towards a woman with whom we can feasibly have dealings4 ,fanatics owe their superhuman endurance during horrible mutilations of the flesh to this same power1 which also gives to martyrs the perfect calm of soul in which they tread the threshold of an awful death4 ,may not this flexible mistress of our understanding be made of the same essence as the motive force of the universe8 ,not our reason but our imagination enables us to grasp the conception of illimitable chaos1 to comprehend the music of the farthest spheres1 to overleap all distance and cast the sum of the faintest stars4 ,by it we can distinguish between world and world1 in their far-fetched and fleeting changes from the incandescent minute of the nucleus to that last frozen silence in which the dead planets circulate3 and also by its means we can see the smallness of things1 even when they are atoms inexpressibly small4 ,not that our imagination is universal4 ,there are causes we will never fathom1 effects we can never know1 forces too occult for us4 ,yet we have monitions of them2 their flickering image hovers sometimes just beyond our grasp1 their last repeated echo dies away in a murmur just too weak for us to understand4 ,therefore in the depths of our subconsciousness the immane with its thousand heads mirrors itself vaguely1 like a wide field agreeing to compress its forms and rarefy its details within the tiny sphere of a prismatic drop of water4 ,our dreams take shape1 and endure and fade1 having seemed reality while they endured4 ,images and sounds and scents of strange marvellous richness dance restlessly through our inner world4 ,this other life which palpitates in us is often more engrossing to us than our public life1 and always more fickle4 ,it has no bounds1 so far as supply of incident and vision is concerned3 but is absolutely limited 7as much as is our physical life7 in its extent of influence4 ,its scope is for ourselves alone4 ,our designs are made and our actions prepared in this domain of our dark fancy1 and the adventures we there conceive only lose in richness and range when they are translated into physical terms4 ,of that realm we are absolute master1 and we rule our universe thence4 ,in it time and space both bow at our behest4 ,by a simple whim we transpose seasons in a moment1 that we may inhabit tropics and the frozen north at once4 ,elements and creatures and things are at our mercy4 ,in this world1 and only in this world1 are we given to know freedom and omnipotence4 ,how do things go in this secret and magical realm of ours1 where we have power to work the miracles denied us in daily life8 ,there we can love and hate1 as we would wish to do1 physically1 can taste the fill of love's joys1 and all of ambition or of crime4 ,we can change our shape1 attend the marvellous revels of fairy-land1 witness horrible massacres1 contemplate the incredible clash of suns4 ,in this our private world neither days nor hours exist to limit us4 ,we can live a thousand centuries in a moment1 or spin out a moment across unending years4 ,this dream-control of matter empowers us somewhat to understand the terrible play of events across eternity and the infinite1 for it must proceed rather in the same manner3 and since the thousand flying shades of chaos can be reflected in our subconsciousness1 it follows that our fancy and our dreams must be made of the same stuff as the nameless force which rules the universe4 ,the forest giant also had its life in a dream--a life which seemed to last for more than seventy centuries1 in the precise surroundings wherein stood this substantial ghost4 ,the dream which made it did not fade wholly with its death1 for to my fancy clouds of wood-dust1 with their sad musty taste1 seemed yet to float after its fall over the vacant place where the tree had stood4 ,my memories of the landscape in which the dream had passed endured after the ending of the dream4 ,birds seemed to fly over the prostrate giant1 and thousands of busy insects flitted about its hollow trunk4 ,the sound of the water came yet to me from far off1 while the sunlight was golden where the tree had breathed1 and night drew its dark curtain round the spot4 ,a mighty rumour filled the space about--for in the subtle world of dream lively truth is given by our imagination to shapes and sounds and smells1 which become ours to create1 to destroy1 or to revive at will4 ,and from my middle place1 hanging between the external world which is ours and the inner world which belongs to me alone1 ,i ask myself1 hesitating and afraid1 if our dreams are not perhaps more than dreams1 if we ourselves are not perhaps creations of some fancy greater than our own1 greater even than our understanding8 ,in which case the external universe might be to the all-seeing ,eye what the world of our imagination is to us--another way of saying that one substance makes substantial the mighty whole1 but that the means1 the forces1 the expression of it are innumerable4 ,it is a strange speculation that we may be ourselves products of the creative thought of some being beyond our thought3 yet very far-reaching is the power of our imagination which can pass from star to star1 can people space1 and conjure up new worlds1 can shadow out to itself the incomprehensible4 ,it is afraid of no height and of no depth3 but one idea escapes it1 gives it dizzy pause--speculation upon the beginning and the end of creation4 ,yet in time our spirit calms itself1 grows resigned to the idea that there was no beginning1 and will be no end1 only an interminable progression4 ,such is the only sober escape from the unbearable notions of a precise beginning and a pre-destined final end1 ideas which if driven home would wreck our peace4 ,a beginning--but how could this be8 ,whence could it come8 and when and how8 and an end--but what could come after that8 ,would it be the starting-point of a new evolution1 of a fresh departure in time8 ,besides1 the very ideas are absurd1 self-contradictory4 ,nature has no exceptions1 no isolated events4 ,in such a haze of strange ideas and confused visions my dream draws to its close4 ,however1 we do not make them of hazardous and fugitive web4 ,into them are woven real figments of our life and immanent seconds from the stock of unchanging time4 ,their elements will float forth across the universe after the dissolution of the adventures whose apparent1 if mental1 form they have for the moment composed4 ,these scattered moments of my faded dream will distribute an impression of the life of the great pine-tree1 which was born and lived and died in its place1 till the sense of it pierces to a tiny immeasurable point1 one of those secret places which we call our cells 444 and then it seems to me that there rises a thin mist of russet wood-powder1 amid a heartrending savour of old age4444