Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well.

Smith’s aphorism treats death as a brute, aesthetically and emotionally repellent truth that the natural world continually veils. “Nature” here is personified as a tactful artist or stage-manager: she surrounds mortality with beauty—growth, blossom, sunlight, birdsong—so that the mind can live among living things without being constantly confronted by decay. The line suggests both consolation and critique. Consolation, because the world’s surface loveliness makes ordinary life bearable; critique, because that loveliness can function as a distraction, encouraging forgetfulness of finitude. The remark belongs to a Romantic-Victorian sensibility that reads landscape as morally and psychologically expressive.