There is hardly a writer now - of the third class probably not one -who has not something sharp and sad to say about the cruelty of Nature; not one who is able to attempt May in the woods without a modern reference to the manifold death and destruction with which the air, the branches, the mosses are said to be full.
But no one has paused in the course of these phrases to take notice of the curious and conspicuous fact of the suppression of death and of the dead throughout this landscape of manifest life.Where are they - all the dying, all the dead, of the populous woods? Where do they hide their little last hours, where are they buried? Where is the violence concealed? Under what gay custom and decent habit?
You may see, it is true, an earth-worm in a robin's beak, and may hear a thrush breaking a snail's shell; but these little things are, as it were, passed by with a kind of twinkle for apology, as by a well-bred man who does openly some little solecism which is too slight for direct mention, and which a meaner man might hide or avoid.Unless you are very modern indeed, you twinkle back at the bird.
But otherwise there is nothing visible of the havoc and the prey and plunder.It is certain that much of the visible life passes violently into other forms, flashes without pause into another flame; but not all.Amid all the killing there must be much dying.
There are, for instance, few birds of prey left in our more accessible counties now, and many thousands of birds must die uncaught by a hawk and unpierced.But if their killing is done so modestly, so then is their dying also.Short lives have all these wild things, but there are innumerable flocks of them always alive;they must die, then, in innumerable flocks.And yet they keep the millions of the dead out of sight.
Now and then, indeed, they may be betrayed.It happened in a cold winter.The late frosts were so sudden, and the famine was so complete, that the birds were taken unawares.The sky and the earth conspired that February to make known all the secrets; everything was published.Death was manifest.Editors, when a great man dies, are not more resolute than was the frost of `95.
The birds were obliged to die in public.They were surprised and forced to do thus.They became like Shelley in the monument which the art and imagination of England combined to raise to his memory at Oxford.
Frost was surely at work in both cases, and in both it wrought wrong.There is a similarity of unreason in betraying the death of a bird and in exhibiting the death of Shelley.The death of a soldier - passe encore.But the death of Shelley was not his goal.
And the death of the birds is so little characteristic of them that, as has just been said, no one in the world is aware of their dying, except only in the case of birds in cages, who, again, are compelled to die with observation.The woodland is guarded and kept by a rule.There is no display of the battlefield in the fields.There is no tale of the game-bag, no boast.The hunting goes on, but with strange decorum.You may pass a fine season under the trees, and see nothing dead except here and there where a boy has been by, or a man with a trap, or a man with a gun.There is nothing like a butcher's shop in the woods.
