hole curtain was
drawn up with incredible swiftness, as if the threads were highly
elastic; and when he reached the rock, it was as hard and solid as
before, nor could he discover any sign of the little creatures. "Ah,"
he said to himself in the dream, "that is the meaning of the _living_
rock!" and he became aware, he thought, that all rocks and stones on
the surface of the earth must be thus endowed with life, and that the
rocks were, so to speak, but the shell that contained these
innumerable little creatures, incredibly minute, living, silken
threads, with a small head, like boring worms, inhabiting burrows
which went far into the heart of the granite, and each with a strong
retractile power.

I told this dream to a geologist the other day, who laughed, "An
ingenious idea," he said, "and there may even be something in it! It
is not by any means certain that stones do not have a certain obscure
life of their own; I have sometimes thought that their marvellous
cohesion may be a sign of life, and that if life were withdrawn, a
mountain might in a moment become a heap of sliding sand."

My friend said that the dream made such an impression upon him that
for a time he found it hard to believe that stones and rocks had not
this strange and secret life lurking in their recesses; and indeed it
has since stood to me as a symbol of life, haunting and penetrating
all the very hardest and driest things. It seems to me that just as
there are almost certainly more colours than our eyes can perceive,
and sounds either too acute or too deliberate for our ears to hear, so
the domain of life may be much further extended in the earth, the air,
the waters, than we can tangibly detect.

It seems too to show me that it is our business to try ceaselessly to
discover the secret life of thought in the world; not to conclude that
there is no vitality in thought unless we can ourselves at once
perceive it. This is particularly the case with books. Sometimes, in
our College Library, I take down an old folio from the shelves, and
as I turn the crackling, stained, irregular pages--it may be a volume
of controversial divinity or outworn philosophy--it seems impossible
to imagine that it can ever have been woven out of the live brain of
man, or that any one can ever have been found to follow those old,
vehement, insecure arguments, starting from unproved data, and leading
to erroneous and fanciful conclusions. The whole thing seems so faded,
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