Poor loving couple whom we have left sobbing with pleasure in the harmonious and fragrant evening-light! It was written that their transport should die, like all else in this world, and that a falling cadence should close it, making its course one with those of the suns and trees. The conviction that our joys are transient may make us sad: but we can draw consolation from the idea that all the dwellers in chaos are within the law. By taking thought we can make strong our souls, and still them, with the certain knowledge of our utter helplessness. Yes, the moment was good for the man and woman by the tall and splendid tree, as they throbbed together in the new sensitiveness of their overcharged emotion: but remorselessly decline will follow on the climax, not merely in the case of the love that grows faint, but for the summer which must yield place to winter, for youth on which old age is waiting, for the spray of water which rises to its height only to fall, for the suns which to-day dazzle us, 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 loneliness. The spiral of being leaps up rapidly to its brilliant apogee, and then runs down again into obscurity while the ring-waves of each action expand ever outward in the infinite. CHAPTER 9 _When the Corselet Snaps_ More pine kernels had sprouted near by, and the great tree was now kept company by other russet trunks, tens of centuries younger, but undergoing the same development. They grew and changed against the same background as the older tree, extracting the nourishment which formed their shape and colour, sap and scent, from the same area. Again the law of perpetuity asserted itself in creation. Near the giant a young tree was fainting and failing. It had not the strong straight shape of the other conifers, nor their sharp, shining needles. Its current of life was crossed, confused. Its sap did not fill its roots and branches, its wood was unhealthy: while on its gnarled trunk grew and increased year by year a huge boss of dead matter, whose weight seemed to crush the whole organism. The stomata laboured feebly in their task of collecting food from the environs, and so reduced the tree's vitality that it felt no thrill from the bounty of spring or summer, while hardly was there any flavour in the weak sap which crept drop by drop through the sick veins of its branches. It seemed tired and faint-hearted in its travail, this sap, like an aged workman: and the tree's whole attitude and effect was that of old age, of a failing constitution such as marks the last stages of life in trees long past their prime.