Let us imagine that the sequoia, on this misty autumn afternoon was recalling its memories. It could a little titillate its cells by remembering those uncounted days, sunny or overcast, those storm-stricken or magical nights, those sharp or restful dawns. Its six thousand years of memory would be to the tree what his sixty years are to an aged man, for in memory and dream we have two means which smooth away the unlike things in time, and give to it, for one looking backward, an equality which active nature hardly possesses. A dream-second or a second in memory may be a century as easily as a year: just as actions which have taken thousands of years to complete may finally have the same contour as little events of an hour. Our eyes can enclose in their fixed impartial frame a huge landscape or a tiny plot of space. What is passed has no existence except in memory: while as for time--we carry it within ourselves, and pay it out slowly or fast (or unconsciously) according to whether we are busy or interested or indifferent. Hours are elastic periods, which expand or contract according to the attention we pay them, and it is our ideas and our passions which mark them off round the face of our days. Time may be imaged as a mirror, a confused mirror across whose impassive face tens of thousands of scenes chase each other in a mazy dance: for in it are reflected the innumerable and never-closing consequences of all action, with all the lights, all the shadows, all the extent and motions of the universe. The mirror itself is changeless, and the semblance of movement lies in the reflection, in that endless rout of fleeting images whose transience is to their glass as our little moment to eternity. Our utmost capacity is to project a thought-ray from our place and instant of existence back into the night which hides our coming, or forward to the night which waits our going--rays whose imagined courses towards the poles of the infinite we cannot follow even in thought. Yet they are our only links with past and future, those two names which together spell eternity: the future a past not yet achieved, and the past a future left behind.