two cows slain by thunderbolts, but neither of them had ever been mine.

The next day I continued the search, and the next, and the next. Finally I hoisted an umbrella over my head, for the weather had become hot, and set out deliberately and systematically to explore every foot of open common on Capitol Hill. I tramped many miles, and found every man's cow but my own-some twelve or fifteen hundred, I should think. I saw many vagrant boys and Irish and coloured women, nearly all of whom had seen a buffalo cow that very day that answered exactly to my description, but in such diverse and widely-separate places that I knew it was no cow of mine. And it was astonishing how many times I was myself deceived; how many rumps or heads, or line backs or white flanks I saw peeping over knolls or from behind fences or other objects that could belong to no cow but mine!

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!

BEFORE GENIUS.

F there did not something else go to the

I making of literature besides mere literary

parts, even the best of them, how long ago the old bards and Biblical writers would have been superseded by the learned professors and gentlemanly versifiers of later times.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 old 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 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 fertilised 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 unliterary element. It is not in the spirit of something far away in the clouds or under the moon, something ethe

real, visionary, and anti-mundane, that Angelo, Dante, and Shakespeare work, but in the spirit of the common nature, and the homeliest facts: through these, and not away from them, the path of the creator lies.

It is no doubt this tendency, always more or less marked in highly refined and cultivated times, to forget or overlook the primary basic qualities, and parade and make much of verbal and technical acquirements, that led Huxley to speak with such bitter scorn of the "senseless caterwauling of the literary classes," for this is not the only country in which books are produced that are a mere skin of elegant words blown up by copious literary gas.

In imaginative works especially, much depends upon the quality of mere weight. A stern, material inertia is indispensable. It is like the immobility and power of resistance of a piece of ordnance, upon which the force and efficacy of the projectile finally depend. In the most daring flights of the master, there is still something which remains indifferent and uncommitted, and which acts as reserve power, making the man always superior to his work. He must always leave the impression that if he