And from my middle place, hanging between the external world which is ours and the inner world which belongs to me alone, I ask myself, hesitating and afraid, if our dreams are not perhaps more than dreams, if we ourselves are not perhaps creations of some fancy greater than our own, greater even than our understanding? In which case the external universe might be to the all-seeing Eye what the world of our imagination is to us--another way of saying that one substance makes substantial the mighty whole, but that the means, the forces, the expression of it are innumerable. It is a strange speculation that we may be ourselves products of the creative thought of some being beyond our thought: yet very far-reaching is the power of our imagination which can pass from star to star, can people space, and conjure up new worlds, can shadow out to itself the incomprehensible. It is afraid of no height and of no depth: but one idea escapes it, gives it dizzy pause--speculation upon the beginning and the end of creation. Yet in time our spirit calms itself, grows resigned to the idea that there was no beginning, and will be no end, only an interminable progression. Such is the only sober escape from the unbearable notions of a precise beginning and a pre-destined final end, ideas which if driven home would wreck our peace. A beginning--but how could this be? Whence could it come? and when and how? and an end--but what could come after that? Would it be the starting-point of a new evolution, of a fresh departure in time? Besides, the very ideas are absurd, self-contradictory. Nature has no exceptions, no isolated events. In such a haze of strange ideas and confused visions my dream draws to its close. However, we do not make them of hazardous and fugitive web. Into them are woven real figments of our life and immanent seconds from the stock of unchanging time. Their elements will float forth across the universe after the dissolution of the adventures whose apparent, if mental, form they have for the moment composed. These scattered moments of my faded dream will distribute an impression of the life of the great pine-tree, which was born and lived and died in its place, till the sense of it pierces to a tiny immeasurable point, one of those secret places which we call our cells ... and then it seems to me that there rises a thin mist of russet wood-powder, amid a heartrending savour of old age....