ot a confidence we have a mind to make; and no one
is authorised to ask for attention or pity on our behalf. The story of
pain ought not to be told of us, seeing that by us it would assuredly not
be told.

There is only one other thing that concerns a man still more exclusively,
and that is his own mental illness, or the dreams and illusions of a long
delirium. When he is in common language not himself, amends should be
made for so bitter a paradox; he should be allowed such solitude as is
possible to the alienated spirit; he should be left to the "not himself,"
and spared the intrusion against which he can so ill guard that he could
hardly have even resented it.

The double helplessness of delusion and death should keep the door of
Rossetti's house, for example, and refuse him to the reader. His mortal
illness had nothing to do with his poetry. Some rather affected
objection is taken every now and then to the publication of some facts
(others being already well known) in the life of Shelley. Nevertheless,
these are all, properly speaking, biography. What is not biography is
the detail of the accident of the manner of his death, the detail of his
cremation. Or if it was to be told--told briefly--it was certainly not
for marble. Shelley's death had no significance, except inasmuch as he
died young. It was a detachable and disconnected incident. Ah, that was
a frost of fancy and of the heart that used it so, dealing with an
insignificant fact, and conferring a futile immortality. Those are ill-
named biographers who seem to think that a betrayal of the ways of death
is a part of their ordinary duty, and that if material enough for a last
chapter does not lie to their hand they are to search it out. They, of
all survivors, are called upon, in honour and reason, to look upon a
death with more composure. To those who loved the dead closely, this is,
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 els