How do _you_ know what the cow may know, As under the tasselled bough she lies, When earth is a-beat with the life below, When the orient mornings redden and glow, When the silent butterflies come and go,-- The dreamy cow with the Juno eyes?
How do _you_ know that she may not know That the meadow all over is lettered, "Love," Or hear the mystic syllable low In the grasses' growth and the waters' flow? How do _you_ know that she may not know What the robin sings on the twig above?
[Footnote: See "The Poet's Friends," _Atlantic Monthly_, vol. v., p. 185.]
There is a moral or a lesson to be found in the life of almost every man, the chief duty of a biographer being to set forth and illustrate this; and a history of the commonest individual, if written truly, could not fail to be interesting to his fellows; for the feelings and aspirations of men are pretty much alike all the world over, and the elements of genius not very unequally distributed through the mass of mankind,--the thing itself being a development due to circumstances, very probably, as much as to anything singular in the man. But there are few good biographies extant; the writers, for the most part, contenting themselves with superficial facts, refusing or unable to follow the mind and motive powers of the subject,--or following these imperfectly. For this reason, they who would read the truest kind of biographies must turn to those written by men of themselves,--that is, the autobiographies; and these are, in fact, found to be among the most attractive specimens of literature in our language, or any other.
The life of any man is more or less of a mystery to other men, and one who would write it effectively must have been intimate with him from his youth onward. When the biography is that of a man of genius, the difficulty is greatly increased, even to the writer who has been his life-long familiar; for genius, by the necessity of its being, implies a departure in a variety of ways from the thoughts and rules of that regulated existence which is most favorable to the progress and welfare of men in the mass,--at least, as these are generally understood. But if the life-long intimacy be wanting in this instance, the task of the writer is the most difficult of all, and almost always a failure,--save in some rare case, where the writer and his subject have been men of a similar stamp.