to do thus. They became like Shelley in the monument which the art and
imagination of England combined to raise to his memory at Oxford.

Frost was surely at work in both cases, and in both it wrought wrong.
There is a similarity of unreason in betraying the death of a bird and in
exhibiting the death of Shelley. The death of a soldier--_passe_
_encore_. But the death of Shelley was not his goal. And the death of
the birds is so little characteristic of them that, as has just been
said, no one in the world is aware of their dying, except only in the
case of birds in cages, who, again, are compelled to die with
observation. The woodland is guarded and kept by a rule. There is no
display of the battlefield in the fields. There is no tale of the game-
bag, no boast. The hunting goes on, but with strange decorum. You may
pass a fine season under the trees, and see nothing dead except here and
there where a boy has been by, or a man with a trap, or a man with a gun.
There is nothing like a butcher's shop in the woods.

But the biographers have always had other ways than those of the wild
world. They will not have a man to die out of sight. I have turned over
scores of "Lives," not to read them, but to see whether now and again
there might be a "Life" which was not more emphatically a death. But
there never is a modern biography that has taken the hint of Nature. One
and all, these books have the disproportionate illness, the death out of
all scale.

Even more wanton than the disclosure of a death is that of a mortal
illness. If the man had recovered, his illness would have been rightly
his own secret. But because he did not recover, it is assumed to be news
for the first comer. Which of us would suffer the details of any
physical suffering, over and done in our own lives, to be displayed and