How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.

MacDonald juxtaposes two kinds of “ending”: death and sunset. A sunset is a daily, visible closure that most people experience as beautiful rather than terrifying, even though it signals darkness and the loss of daylight. By calling fear of death “strange,” he implies that our dread is not purely rational but culturally and psychologically conditioned—an inability to imagine the next phase as part of a larger, meaningful order. The line invites a reorientation of feeling: to see death less as annihilation and more as transition, akin to nature’s rhythms. It also hints at a spiritual perspective common in MacDonald’s thought, where trust and hope can transfigure what seems like an end into a passage.