It was now summer. The still air was elastic and alive, and transmitted a shining lightness to the world. All was green and gay and content, serene as the unflecked sky and the splendid sun. Girt about with this joyous and pellucid atmosphere stood the giant, tall as ever, but contrasting more sharply against its pure keenness. The huge embrace, vivid and blue and green, in which heaven held earth, seemed almost violent in opposition to the spirit of the tree, whose dead branches and scarred trunk and weary roots marked a heavy despondency. Sorrow in spring and summer is quite unlike sorrow in autumn or winter. When the year dies the current of life is dying too, whereas in spring-time the new sharp vigour of life makes any sadness seem doubly desolate. The warm sun and renewal of activity in animals and plants, the liveliness of those about us intensify our grief, which, when autumn comes, is in keeping with the common tendency of nature, and becomes moderate, soothed by the absence of joy in others. Apposition is the greatest tonic of colours, as analogy clears the vision: accordingly this day of fairest summer, with its luxuriant flowers and plants about which the bees were humming in the sunshine so that nature seemed to sing softly to itself in the jocund air and the universal gladness made the far hills come together for joy, this day made prominent the infinite desolation of the giant's aspect. The gold of the sunlight was gilding the singing ripples of the water, the birds were flinging their loudest notes upon the velvet air, the wild beasts were supine with excess of well-being, the plants were burgeoning and swelling with sap in the afflatus of their perfumes: but the sequoia, alone, was bitten through and compassed with the bitter smell of old age, and felt life draw back from its insensitive branches, from its ruined trunk, from its hidden roots, now lifeless and impassive among the former fertilizing benefits of the juices underground. The trees near-by were preening themselves in the rain of sun-starts, shuddering with the force of the new waves of life pumped into them from the teeming earth. The wind thrilled through their branches and all nature came together in that healthy rush of new life, which had once been common also to the giant tree. Once! for now the inside of its trunk was powdered thick with that rain of fine red wood-dust, falling ever more fast towards the tree's ruin.