is dead, and it is too late forevermore. Then with vague
restlessness you visit the brook in which his trout-line drooped, you
pluck a leaf from the elm that shaded his regal head, you walk in the
graveyard that holds in its bosom his silent dust, only to feel with
unavailing regret that no sunshine of his presence can gleam upon you.
The life that stirred in his voice, shone in his eye, and fortressed
itself in his unconscious bearing, can make to you no revelation. It is
departed, none knows whither. He is as much a part of the past as if he
had tended docks for Abraham on the plains of Mamre.

This, when biographies are at their best. Generally, they are at their
worst. Generally, they don't know the things you wish to learn, and when
they do, they don't tell them. They give you statistics, facts,
reflections, eulogies, dissertations; but what you hunger and thirst
after is the man's inner life. Of what use is it to know what a man
does, unless you know what made him do it? This you can seldom learn
from memoirs. Look at the numerous brood that followed in the wake of
Shelley's fame. Every one gives you, not Shelley, but himself, served up
in Shelley sauce. Think of your own experience: do you not know that the
vital facts of your life are hermetically sealed? Do you not know that
you are a world within a world, whose history and geography may be
summed up in that phrase which used to make the interior of Africa the
most delightful spot in the whole atlas,--"Unexplored Region"? One
person may have started an expedition here, and another there. Here one
may have struck a river-course, and there one may have looked down into
a valley-depth, and all may have brought away their golden grain; but
the one has not followed the river to its source, nor the other wandered
bewilderingly through the valley-lands, and none have traversed the
Field of the Cloth of Gold. So the geographies are all alike:
boundaries, capital, chief towns, rivers, mountains, and lakes. And what
is true of you is doubtless true of all. Faith is not to be put in
biographies. They can tell what your name is, and what was your
grandfather's coat of arms, when you were born, where you lived, and how
you died,--though, if they are no more accurate after you are dead than
they are before, their statements will hardly come under the head of
"reliable intelligence." But even if they are accurate, what then?
Suppose you were born in Pikesville: a thousand peop