But why should you keep your head over your shoulder?  Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat[184] you have stated in this or that public place?  Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then?  It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.  In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity; yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color.  Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.[185]

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 the 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 everything you said to-day.—­“Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.”—­Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?  Pythagoras[186] was misunderstood, and Socrates,[187] and Jesus, and Luther,[188] and Copernicus,[189] and Galileo,[190] and Newton,[191] 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[192] and Himmaleh[193] 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;[194]—­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 distance, at a little height of thought.  One tendency unites them all.  The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.[195] See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.  Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions.  Your conformity explains nothing.  Act singly, and what