"Men live and die, the song remains; and when
I list the passion of thy vernal breath
Methinks thou singest best to Love and Death—
To happy Lovers and to dying Men."
Autumn and death must needs be naturally allied in human thought, though to the joyous-minded even autumn will be associated with its present fruitage rather than with its presage of dissolution; but this intrusion of death into a celebration of the life and growth of spring seems irrelevant, almost morbid: it may even seem artificial, as if the poet were deliberately striving after a strong literary effect by the expedient of an unnatural juxtaposition of incongruous ideas. To a man of Smith's mind and temperament it has certainly neither irrelevance nor artificiality; whether we can rightly call it morbid depends upon the meaning we attach to a word to which the personal feeling rather than the common reason gives a definition. Smith's habit was to endeavour to realise death that he might more fully and richly realise life.
"To denude death of its terrible associations," he writes, "were a vain attempt, the atmosphere is always cold around an iceberg"; and yet in imagination he loves to draw near the iceberg for some shivering moments that he may enjoy more exquisitely the warmth of summer sun or piled-up winter fire. To his constant thought
"There are considerations which rob death of its ghastliness, and help to reconcile us to it. The thoughtful happiness of a human being is complex, and in certain moved moments which, after they have gone, we can recognise to have been our happiest, some subtle thought of death has been curiously intermixed. And this subtle admixture it is that gives the happy moment its character—which makes the difference between the gladness of a child, resident in mere animal health and impulse, and too volatile to be remembered, and the serious joy of a
