XII. 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 som