The Wind and the Trees

I am sitting under tall trees, with a great wind boiling like surf
about the tops of them, so that their living load of leaves rocks
and roars in something that is at once exultation and agony.
I feel, in fact, as if I were actually sitting at the bottom
of the sea among mere anchors and ropes, while over my head
and over the green twilight of water sounded the everlasting rush
of waves and the toil and crash and shipwreck of tremendous ships.
The wind tugs at the trees as if it might pluck them root
and all out of the earth like tufts of grass. Or, to try yet
another desperate figure of speech for this unspeakable energy,
the trees are straining and tearing and lashing as if they
were a tribe of dragons each tied by the tail.

As I look at these top-heavy giants tortured by an invisible
and violent witchcraft, a phrase comes back into my mind.
I remember a little boy of my acquaintance who was once walking
in Battersea Park under just such torn skies and tossing trees.
He did not like the wind at all; it blew in his face too much;
it made him shut his eyes; and it blew off his hat, of which
he was very proud. He was, as far as I remember, about four.
After complaining repeatedly of the atmospheric unrest, he said
at last to his mother, "Well, why don't you take away the trees,
and then it wouldn't wind."

Nothing could be more intelligent or natural than this mistake.
Any one looking for the first time at the trees might fancy
that they were indeed vast and titanic fans, which by their mere
waving agitated the air around them for miles. Nothing, I say,
could be more human and excusable than the belief that it is
the trees which make the wind. Indeed, the belief is so human
and excusable that it is, as a matter of fact, the belief of about
ninety-nine out of a hundred of the philosophers, reformers,
sociologists, and politicians of the great age in which we live.
My small friend was, in fact, very like the principal modern thinkers;
only much nicer.

. . . . .

In the little apologue or parable which he has thus the honour
of inventing, the trees stand for all visible things
and the wind for the invisible. The wind is the spirit
which bloweth where it listeth; the trees are the material
things of the world which are blown where the spirit lists.
The wind is philosophy, religion, revolution; the trees are
cities and civilisations. We only know that there is a wind
because the trees on some distant hill suddenly go mad.
We only know that there is a real revolution because all
the chimney-pots go mad on the whole skyline of the city.

Just as the ragged outline of a tree grows suddenly more
ragged and rises into fantastic crests or tattered tails,