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.




THE HONOURS OF MORTALITY


The brilliant talent which has quite lately and quite suddenly arisen, to
devote itself to the use of the day or of the week, in illustrated
papers--the enormous production of art in black and white--is assuredly a
confession that the Honours of Mortality are worth working for. Fifty
years ago, men worked for the honours of immortality; these were the
commonplace of their ambition; they declined to attend to the beauty of