a leafy forest is in
comparison hard, gross and blotchy; the clouds of night do not more
certainly obscure the moon than those green and monstrous clouds obscure
the tree; the actual sight of the little wood, with its gray and silver
sea of life, is entirely a winter vision. So dim and delicate is the
heart of the winter woods, a kind of glittering gloaming, that a figure
stepping towards us in the chequered twilight seems as if he were
breaking through unfathomable depths of spiders' webs.

But surely the idea that its leaves are the chief grace of a tree is a
vulgar one, on a par with the idea that his hair is the chief grace of a
pianist. When winter, that healthy ascetic, carries his gigantic razor
over hill and valley, and shaves all the trees like monks, we feel
surely that they are all the more like trees if they are shorn, just as
so many painters and musicians would be all the more like men if they
were less like mops. But it does appear to be a deep and essential
difficulty that men have an abiding terror of their own structure, or of
the structure of things they love. This is felt dimly in the skeleton of
the tree: it is felt profoundly in the skeleton of the man.

The importance of the human skeleton is very great, and the horror with
which it is commonly regarded is somewhat mysterious. Without claiming
for the human skeleton a wholly conventional beauty, we may assert that
he is certainly not uglier than a bull-dog, whose popularity never
wanes, and that he has a vastly more cheerful and ingratiating
expression. But just as man is mysteriously ashamed of the skeletons of
the trees in winter, so he is mysteriously ashamed of the skeleton of
himself in death. It is a singular thing altogether, this horror of the
architecture of things. One would think it would be most unwise in a man
to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite
insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.

One ground exists for this terror: a strange idea has infected humanity
that the skeleton is typical of death. A man might as well say that a
factory chimney was typical of bankruptcy. The factory may be left naked
after ruin, the skeleton may be left naked after bodily dissolution; but
both of them have had a lively and workmanlike life of their own, all
the pulleys creaking, all the wheels turning, in the House of Livelihood
as in the House of Life. There is no reason why this creature (new, as I
fancy, to a