the diadem from his brow, until he 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 people drew their first breath there, and not one of them was like you in character or fate.  You were born in some year of our Lord.  Thousands upon thousands date from the same year, and each went his own way,—­

    “One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
    One to the peaceful sea!”