We go abroad in a throng of atoms, the basic materials of distant and diverse forms of life. Sometimes they breathe upon us, sometimes we hear them, sometimes we see them. At other times they move us to love or hope or fear, melt us to tenderness, brace us to deep efforts, or daze us with weird portents. To this vagabond star-dust we can ascribe a sometime fit of passion or wrath, of madness or joy. The world about us is all peopled with these spirit-mists. We live red moments and white moments, odorous or musical moments, moments of pain or love, brief or slow, loud or peaceful. Space, to repeat, builds up nature out of its own substance: and likewise unchanging time makes use of its own essence to assemble and arrange and fix the order of events. Evening came down wan and weeping over the uncertain scene. The mist thickened into clouds like smoke, whilst silence and a baseless lethargy soaked through the sluggish air. The giant tree loomed straight and huge in the twilight, its form as ever, its colours those which it had assumed on so many evenings. Neither shape nor appearance was different from those with which it had fronted the autumns of many years, and their intricate pallors; but never before had it looked so desolate in the desolate splendour of its setting. Its sadness was as patent as the sadness of the landscape: and since neither the content nor the surface of this November gloaming appeared different from those of past autumns the source of this changed feeling had to be searched for. There was no motion in the tree, nor stirring of a blade of grass, nor strange gleam through the fog; nor did the chill air feel endued with a particular quality: yet this depression over the world was true and heavy, weighing down all spirits and things from some unknown direction, and by imperceptible means. It could only have been the product of secret universal influences vibrating in space as a cloud of invisible particles able to link time to matter, as dreams to reality. The giant was weary, the giant was sick: and the mysterious sorrow of its pain was diffused about it like an odour. The low clouds continued to collect together, darkening with their purple masses the violet striations of the unwholesome sky. The still country-side was suddenly stirred by a faint shudder. It was that the sun had set. The first approach of evening yet held relics of the light of day: and through it came another sudden tremor, which awoke the slumbering air, and the inert earth, the pale grass, the scattered pebbles in the plain, the roosting birds, the beasts in their dens men in their houses, and insects in their inmost hiding-places. The pine-tree in turn felt this invisible convulsion penetrate strangely from its crest to its roots.