I would say that this inexplicable symmetry is one of the laws which govern the seen, and probably also the unseen, world. Ideas, beings, things, phenomena of all kinds exhibit to us much the same beginnings, similar developments, and parallel endings. This fact we can grasp only piecemeal, not in its whole; but it is clear that always there is an analogy between extremes. We know that plant-roots are like their heads. Dawn and twilight (opposed limits of a natural event) are like one another: the same pallid colours, the same freshness, the same effect of unambitious calm. Sunrise and sunset, respectively the appearance and the disappearance of our day-star, glare at us with a like extravagance of noisy red. Old age and childhood, the two poles of human life, resemble one another in their feebleness and weak vitality. Our great joys are silent as our great sorrows; and the ecstasy of love is not far from the frenzy of hate. Nature is re-born in spring-tide, and falls sadly asleep when autumn closes: and yet these two seasons are very like--showers of rain and gusty winds, shot across with the same weak rays of yellow light. We find this odd likeness of contrasts not merely in visible nature and in life, but also in the most subtle abstractions of the spiritual world. We expect a great happiness as anxiously as a great misfortune, and when we do things our first conception, and the memory which follows it, trace in our minds the same sort of hazy contour in fleeting neutral tint. The nescience of our birth is like our death's. Oh! 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 regularity. CHAPTER 5 _Caught up into the Stream of Life_ In the summer when the sky was blue and the air diaphanous, in autumn with its melancholy mist, in winter when the wind blew cold and clean and sharp, our tree lived on and prospered with the passing years. For now it had become a tree, a giant sequoia pine. It stood a little clear of a forest in an open space, and so looked solitary. Its head towered over the surrounding country from its place in the blue and green opalescent gulf of heaven. The forest whose leaves danced tremblingly before its feet was made up of quite other trees: delicate lively things, of middle but swift height, and thin-branched, so that the wind and the sunlight wove patterns easily through their frail screen.