Explore "A Point of Biography" by Alice Meynell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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.