200 Winter 



and the twinkling icicles. The sea's fury is soothed and 

 stilled, his clamour subsides, his breakers turn wavelets,, 

 and his dead are laid gently on his frozen beach. There 

 they rest peacefully enough : peacefully as the birds 

 you find frozen to the twig whereon they perched. 

 In thawing-time the little corpses tumble off; and 

 the tale of tiny things gone out of life that is told by 

 the melting snow on moor and meadow is more or less - 

 hideously complete. 



Yet who curses Nature for cruel ? Ourselves are 

 part of her ; and be her mood what it may, ourselves 

 are more closely in sympathy with her, our mother, 

 than with any of her victims. In truth, the East has 

 no deeper fatalism than burns in us Westerns. As 

 no man rebels against death, so neither is there any 

 revolt against the accomplishment of the Hand of 

 God. The sublime tempest strews the coast with 

 wrecks : the beautiful lightning is Death's messenger ; 

 Winter, with his dreams and his sleep, his voice of 

 lamentation and his mortal visitations of frost and 

 storm, is a weird and gruesome bedfellow. And as 

 you watch the shy woodlanders adventuring to the 

 very doorstep, and the wretched hare so beside himself 

 with want that he will rush upon death for a mouth- 

 ful from your garden, a sense of pity and wrath will oft- 

 times menace that spirit of acquiescence and devout- 

 ness in which is the best and sanest habit of living 

 life can ever achieve. For without death there can be 

 no living, for Death and Life are not mortal enemies 



