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, properlyspeaking, 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 futileimmortality. 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 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.

CLOUD
During a part of the year London does not see the clouds. Not to

see the clear sky might seem her chief loss, but that is shared by
the rest of England, and is, besides, but a slight privation. Not

to see the clear sky is, elsewhere, to see the cloud. But not so in
London. You may go for a week or two at a time, even though you

hold your head up as you walk, and even though you have windows that
really open, and yet you shall see no cloud, or but a single edge,

the fragment of a form.
Guillotine windows never wholly open, but are filled with a doubled

glass towards the sky when you open them towards the street. They
are, therefore, a sure sign that for all the years when no other

windows were used in London, nobody there cared much for the sky, or
even knew so much as whether there were a sky.

But the privation of cloud is indeed a graver loss than the world
knows. Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is not all. Men go in

search of it; but the celestialscenery journeys to them. It goes
its way round the world. It has no nation, it costs no weariness,

it knows no bonds. The terrestrial scenery - the tourist's - is a
prisoner compared with this. The tourist's scenery moves indeed,

but only like Wordsworth's maiden, with earth's diurnal course; it
is made as fast as its own graves. And for its changes it depends

upon the mobility of the skies. The mere green flushing of its own
sap makes only the least of its varieties; for the greater it must

wait upon the visits of the light. Spring and autumn are
inconsiderable events in a landscape compared with the shadows of a

cloud.
The cloud controls the light, and the mountains on earth appear or

fade according to its passage; they wear so simply, from head to
foot, the luminous grey or the emphaticpurple, as the cloud

permits, that their own local colour and their own local season are
lost and cease, effaced before the all-important mood of the cloud.

The sea has no mood except that of the sky and of its winds. It is
the cloud that, holding the sun's rays in a sheaf as a giant holds a

handful of spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge
with a delicaterevelation of light, or suddenly puts it out and

makes the foreground shine.
Every one knows the manifest work of the cloud when it descends and

partakes in the landscapeobviously, lies half-way across the
mountain slope, stoops to rain heavily upon the lake, and blots out

part of the view by the rough method of standing in front of it.
But its greatest things are done from its own place, aloft. Thence

does it distribute the sun.
Thence does it lock away between the hills and valleys more

mysteries than a poet conceals, but, like him, not by interception.
Thence it writes out and cancels all the tracery of Monte Rosa, or

lets the pencils of the sun renew them. Thence, hiding nothing, and
yet making dark, it sheds deep colour upon the forest land of

Sussex, so that, seen from the hills, all the country is divided
between grave blue and graver sunlight.

And all this is but its influence, its secondary work upon the
world. Its own beauty is unaltered when it has no earthly beauty to

improve. It is always great: above the street, above the suburbs,
above the gas-works and the stucco, above the faces of painted white

houses - the painted surfaces that have been devised as the only
things able to vulgarise light, as they catch it and reflect it

grotesquely from their importunate gloss. This is to be well seen
on a sunny evening in Regent Street.

Even here the cloud is not so victorious as when it towers above
some little landscape of rather paltry interest - a conventional

river heavy with water, gardens with their little evergreens, walks,
and shrubberies; and thick trees impervious to the light, touched,

as the novelists always have it, with "autumn tints." High over
these rises, in the enormous scale of the scenery of clouds, what no

man expected - an heroic sky. Few of the things that were ever done
upon earth are great enough to be done under such a heaven. It was

surely designed for other days. It is for an epic world. Your eyes
sweep a thousand miles of cloud. What are the distances of earth to

these, and what are the distances of the clear and cloudless sky?
The very horizons of the landscape are near, for the round world

dips so soon; and the distances of the mere clear sky are unmeasured
- you rest upon nothing until you come to a star, and the star

itself is immeasurable.
But in the sky of "sunny Alps" of clouds the sight goes farther,

with consciousflight, than it could ever have journeyed otherwise.
Man would not have known distance veritably without the clouds.

There are mountains indeed, precipices and deeps, to which those of
the earth are pigmy. Yet the sky-heights, being so far off, are not

overpowering by disproportion, like some futile building fatuously
made too big for the human measure. The cloud in its majestic place

composes with a little Perugino tree. For you stand or stray in the
futile building, while the cloud is no mansion for man, and out of

reach of his limitations.
The cloud, moreover, controls the sun, not merely by keeping the

custody of his rays, but by becoming the counsellor of his temper.
The cloud veils an angry sun, or, more terribly, lets fly an angry

ray, suddenly bright upon tree and tower, with iron-grey storm for a