Such would have been the thoughts of the sequoia (had it been able to think like us) on this chill November day, as it stood there by the grove of its sons and grandsons, the derived pine-trees which had sprung up about it, yet had not, even the greatest of them, reached to half its height: and something of the same train of thought might have been started by the sight of the neighbouring forest, now in its twentieth generation. These other trees had passed from youth to maturity, and then grown old and died, changing their promise into performance, and at last becoming a mere memory; and each stage of their lives, each tree at every age was to be seen reflected in the impassive glass of time, which kept of them no record nor trace, but preserved itself intact against them, as against all phases of the universe that had been, that was, that ever would be. Years, hours, minutes and moments are not children of Time, but circumstance made visible in some one or something. Only dreams seem able to assert themselves beyond the face of time's unchanging mirror. They shine and register, wheel and flit in the darkling mist of eternity, with something of its power to embrace æons and seconds alike. Like eternity too they harmonize and arrange the great things of the universe with the least, with things so small that they leave no mark even in the cloud-confines of the immaterial: and again like eternity they have no beginning and no end, and so convey something of the incommunicable character of chaos.