for a time, impossible. To them death becomes, for a year,
disproportionate. Their dreams are fixed upon it night by night. They
have, in those dreams, to find the dead in some labyrinth; they have to
mourn his dying and to welcome his recovery in such a mingling of
distress and of always incredulous happiness as is not known even to
dreams save in that first year of separation. But they are not
biographers.

If death is the privacy of the woods, it is the more conspicuously secret
because it is their only privacy. You may watch or may surprise
everything else. The nest is retired, not hidden. The chase goes on
everywhere. It is wonderful how the perpetual chase seems to cause no
perpetual fear. The songs are all audible. Life is undefended,
careless, nimble and noisy.

It is a happy thing that minor artists have ceased, or almost ceased, to
paint dead birds. Time was when they did it continually in that British
School of water-colour art, stippled, of which surrounding nations, it
was agreed, were envious. They must have killed their bird to paint him,
for he is not to be caught dead. A bird is more easily caught alive than
dead.

A poet, on the contrary, is easily--too easily--caught dead. Minor
artists now seldom stipple the bird on its back, but a good sculptor and
a University together modelled their Shelley on his back, unessentially
drowned; and everybody may read about the sick mind of Dante Rossetti.