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KING PELLINORE’S LITERARY MAGAZINE

and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the
hand of the harlot, and flee.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the
wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-
morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words
again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. —
'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so
bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was
misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and
Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and
wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be
misunderstood.

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies
of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the
inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in
the curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge
and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian
stanza; — read it forward, backward, or across, it still
spells the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life
which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest
thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot
doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not,
and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound
with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window
should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his
bill into my web also. We pass for what we are. Character
teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they
communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions,
and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every
moment.

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of
actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour.
For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however
unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little

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