In literature and art, this personal outcome is of the highest value; in fact, it is the only thing truly valuable. The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself. The great man is the man who does a thing for the first time. It was a difficult thing to discover America; since it has been discovered, it has been found an easy enough task to sail thither. It is this peculiar something resident in a poem or a painting which is its final test,--at all events, possessing it, it has the elements of endurance. Apart from its other values, it has, in virtue of that, a biographical one; it becomes a study of character; it is a window through which you can look into a human interior. There is a cleverness in the world which seems to have neither father nor mother. It exists, but it is impossible to tell from whence it comes,--just as it is impossible to lift the shed apple-blossom of an orchard, and to discover, from its bloom and odour, to what branch it belonged. Such cleverness illustrates nothing: it is an anonymous letter. Look at it ever so long, and you cannot tell its lineage. It lives in the catalogue of waifs and strays. On the other hand, there are men whose every expression is characteristic, whose every idea seems to come out of a mould. In the short sentence, or curt, careless saying of such when laid bare, you can read their histories so far, as in the smallest segment of a tree you can trace the markings of its rings. The first dies, because it is shallow-rooted, and has no vitality beyond its own; the second lives, because it is related to and fed by something higher than itself. The famous axiom of Mrs. Glass, that in order to make hare-soup you "must first catch your hare," has a wide significance. In art, literature, social life, morals even, you must first catch your man: that done, everything else follows as a matter of course. A man may learn much; but for the most important thing of all he can find neither teachers nor schools.