Through all the changing pomp of seasons, while the sun showered down its yellow rays, while the rain striped it with grey markings, and the snow lay heavy and white upon it, the vision of the tree was present to me, first as a colossal column, standing up in heaven, then as a broken ruin, prostrate on the ground. As through a light haze I have tried to distinguish the splendour of its life, and the tragedy of its death: and all this while the blue and green and grey country in which the sequoia lived and died has become in some degree my own country, a part of me. I grew to love those distant hills, modulating away to invisibility on some shining day of spring; I learned to feel the sadness of the autumn twilights which made the background of the pine-tree go so pale and lifeless and desolate. I traced at length the slow circulation of the giant's sap, and became sensitive like the tree to light and shadow, to all the influences, exciting or soporific, of the type of country in which I had placed it. Nevertheless, all this creation of a vast landscape, and the huge form of the tree, took shape, endured, and ended in a tiny space, one of those imperceptible and secret compartments called cells, parts of our bodies immeasurable by human wit. Outside my window the world was growing feeble in the failing autumn, but from the white page which I slowly darkened with my writing bloomed for my sight a summer scene of green and gold, where once the giant tree had stood, but which now was again become clear ground and azure sky: and I told myself how shortly my memory-cell would produce for me a new mind-landscape, new images, new sentiments. Such dreams, born within ourselves, have the vividness of real incidents, while they last: to such a degree that it seems questionable whether the physical shocks we undergo and the palpable matter we encounter are really the intensest experiences of our lives. May it not be rather that our sharpest colouring comes from the volatile and obscure matter of our ideas and dreams, with its rich palette of innumerable shades? Only by means of the abstract part of our nature do we commune with the universe. Our likes and dislikes, our delights and despairs are not the issue of our carnal parts, offspring of our blood and nerves, except in so far as these are submissive conductors of the hidden reactions of our imagination. A single dream will change the current of our life, and our actions are the product of the powerful but hidden inner world of our minds.