Not Even For The Babes Did The Snow Cease Or The Keen Wind
Rest; The Very Fire Could Scarcely Struggle Against It.
Snow-rain and
ice-rain; frost-formed snow-granules, driven along like shot, stinging
and rattling against the tent-cloth, hissing in the fire; roar and groan
of the great wind among the oaks of the forest.
No kindness to man, from
birth-hour to ending; neither earth, sky, nor gods care for him, innocent
at the mother's breast. Nothing good to man but man. Let man, then, leave
his gods and lift up his ideal beyond them.
Something grey and spotted and puffy, not unlike a toad, moved about
under the gorse of the garden hedge one morning, half hidden by the
stalks of old grasses. By-and-by it hopped out - the last thrush, so
distended with puffed feathers against the frost as to be almost
shapeless. He searched about hopelessly round the stones and in the
nooks, all hard and frostbound; there was the shell of a snail, dry and
whitened and empty, as was apparent enough even at a distance. His keen
eye must have told him that it was empty; yet such was his hunger and
despair that he took it and dashed it to pieces against a stone. Like a
human being, his imagination was stronger than his experience; he tried
to persuade himself that there might be something there; hoping against
hope. Mind, you see, working in the bird's brain, and overlooking facts.
A mere mechanism would have left the empty and useless shell
untouched - would have accepted facts at once, however bitter, just as the
balance on the heaviest side declines immediately, obeying the fact of an
extra grain of weight.
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