Finally I gave up the search, concluded the cow had been stolen, and advertised her, offering a reward.  But days passed, and no tidings were obtained.  Hope began to burn pretty low,—­was indeed on the point of going out altogether,—­when one afternoon, as I was strolling over the commons (for in my walks I still hovered about the scenes of my lost milcher), I saw the rump of a cow, over a grassy knoll, that looked familiar.  Coming nearer, the beast lifted up her head; and, behold! it was she! only a few squares from home, where doubtless she had been most of the time.  I had overshot the mark in my search.  I had ransacked the far-off, and had neglected the near-at-hand, as we are so apt to do.  But she was ruined as a milcher, and her history thenceforward was brief and touching!

VII BEFORE GENIUS

If there did not something else go to the making of literature besides mere literary parts, even the best of them, how long ago the old bards and the Biblical writers would have been superseded by the learned professors and the gentlemanly versifiers of later times!  Is there to-day a popular poet, using the English language, who does not, in technical acquirements and in the artificial adjuncts of poetry,—­rhyme, metre, melody, and especially sweet, dainty fancies,—­surpass Europe’s and Asia’s loftiest and oldest?  Indeed, so marked is the success of the latter-day poets in this respect, that any ordinary reader may well be puzzled, and ask, if the shaggy antique masters are poets, what are the refined and euphonious producers of our own day?

If we were to inquire what this something else is which is prerequisite to any deep and lasting success in literature, we should undoubtedly find that it is the man behind the book.  It is the fashion of the day to attribute all splendid results to genius and culture.  But genius and culture are not enough.  “All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of honesty and goodness,” says Montaigne.  The quality of simple manhood, and the universal human traits which form the bond of union between man and man,—­which form the basis of society, of the family, of government, of friendship,—­ are quite overlooked; and the credit is given to some special facility, or to brilliant and lucky hit.  Does any one doubt that the great poets and artists are made up mainly of the most common universal human and heroic characteristics?—­that in them, though working to other ends, is all that construct the soldier, the sailor, the farmer, the discoverer, the bringer-to-pass in any field, and that their work is good and enduring in proportion as it is saturated and fertilized by the qualities of these?  Good human stock is the main dependence.  No great poet ever appeared except from a race of good fighters, good eaters, good sleepers, good breeders.  Literature dies with the decay of the un-literary element.  It is not in the spirit of something far away in the clouds or under the moon, something ethereal, visionary, and anti-mundane, that Angelo, Dante, and Shakespeare work, but in the spirit of common Nature and of the homeliest facts; through these, and not away from them, the path of the creator lies.