This may explain why associations of things are sometimes swayed to a common feeling or purpose by invisible means. We often note that a sense of gaiety or of suffering, of liveliness or of resignation, of calm or disquietude imposes itself on us and on our neighbours, quite independently of our own state of mind. Both animate and inanimate things are subject to such changes of state, which may last a long or a short time, may be restricted or general, but which generally lead their objects in an undesigned direction. Such forms have probably played a wide and yet undetected part in the history of mankind, and also in the physical history of the globe: they may account for some of our unexpected and abrupt departures from the usual manner, for the irregular impulses which make us commit acts foreign to our normal will and nature. So that the unknown, into which pass our dead acts and ideas, may itself conceal also the sources of our resolutions and of our performances.
The evening closed in yet more, its clouds slowly veiling the heavens, while the mists thickened, and covered up the ground: yet the unnameable trouble, which so mysteriously gripped the region, had faded as mysteriously as it had come. Unchanged, in its surrounding silence and circumstances stood the giant, serene once more. True it was still tired, and the sap in its veins felt enfeebled by advancing age; but the sense of misery and desolation just now weighing upon it had been lifted. The dismal pomp of invisible minutes of grief had wended its way past, invisibly. These sad, dark, disaster-laden minutes—from what black event, and whence had they been derived? What incalculable journey had they made? and whither would their uncontrolled and endless course next tend? And the great tree itself, standing there so stiff under that autumn sky, so remote from ours—what can have been these detached moments of its life and being which come from its stem to interest us, to bring to our lamp-lighted room the ghosts of its joy and the shades of its pain? What were these acts, these enjoyed moments of the giant's life, that they can so float about us, murmur to us, hold our interest, that even to our dreams come memories and broken incidents of what it was? that as the tale of its death draws near to be told, we feel grief for that huge ruddy trunk?
Perhaps it is because the thoughts which take wing from our souls, as from the souls of things, are so many parcels of vital essence, which pass over the face of the mirror of changeless time, and look into it and are pictured there, and then break up and rearrange themselves, but never die.
CHAPTER 12
When the Wood-Dust floated in the Air
Whilst the August sun was pouring its clear warm rays from the blue heavens upon the world, a fine wood-powder continued to rain down from all the internal cavities of the giant's trunk, in a reddish dust which lay deep upon the roots. The tree's substance had been so falling away for centuries, with every now and then a larger dilapidation when some great cavity formed itself within its thickness: while on the outside the harsh bark as slowly decayed.
Beneath the soil in the still-kindly darkness of the earth's heart the roots, regretting their failed vivacity, were now resigned to grow more dry and twisted and inert day by day, powerless any more to suck life-giving nourishment from their ground. On the surface of the earth the eternal counter-change of life and death proceeded. Thousands of births, both plant and animal, occurred, to compensate for the thousands of deaths, the wheel of life impartially grinding out change or creation or destructiveness.
It was now summer. The still air was elastic and alive, and transmitted a shining lightness to the world. All was green and gay and content, serene as the unflecked sky and the splendid sun. Girt about with this joyous and pellucid atmosphere stood the giant, tall as ever, but contrasting more sharply against its pure keenness. The huge embrace, vivid and blue and green, in which heaven held earth, seemed almost violent in opposition to the spirit of the tree, whose dead branches and scarred trunk and weary roots marked a heavy despondency.
Sorrow in spring and summer is quite unlike sorrow in autumn or winter. When the year dies the current of life is dying too, whereas in spring-time the new sharp vigour of life makes any sadness seem doubly desolate. The warm sun and renewal of activity in animals and plants, the liveliness of those about us intensify our grief, which, when autumn comes, is in keeping with the common tendency of nature, and becomes moderate, soothed by the absence of joy in others. Apposition is the greatest tonic of colours, as analogy clears the vision: accordingly this day of fairest summer, 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 joy, this day made prominent the infinite desolation of the giant's aspect.
The gold of the sunlight was gilding the singing ripples of the water, the birds were flinging their loudest notes upon the velvet air, the wild beasts were supine with excess of well-being, the plants were burgeoning and swelling with sap in the afflatus of their perfumes: but the sequoia, alone, was bitten through and compassed with the bitter smell of old age, and felt life draw back from its insensitive branches, from its ruined trunk, from its hidden roots, now lifeless and impassive among the former fertilizing benefits of the juices underground. The trees near-by were preening themselves in the rain of sun-starts, shuddering with the force of the new waves of life pumped into them from the teeming earth. The wind thrilled through their branches and all nature came together in that healthy rush of new life, which had once been common also to the giant tree. Once! for now the inside of its trunk was powdered thick with that rain of fine red wood-dust, falling ever more fast towards the tree's ruin.