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.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25