reeling home from their debauches!  Yet better even excess than lying and hypocrisy; and if wine is upon all our tables, let us praise it for its color and fragrance and social tendency, so far as it deserves, and not hug a bottle in the closet and pretend not to know the use of a wine-glass at a public dinner!  I think you will find that people who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be “consistent.”  But a great many things we say can be made to appear contradictory, simply because they are partial views of a truth, and may often look unlike at first, as a front view of a face and its profile often do.

Here is a distinguished divine, for whom I have great respect, for I owe him a charming hour at one of our literary anniversaries, and he has often spoken noble words; but he holds up a remark of my friend the “Autocrat,”—­which I grieve to say he twice misquotes, by omitting the very word which gives it its significance,—­the word fluid, intended to typify the mobility of the restricted will,—­holds it up, I say, as if it attacked the reality of the self-determining principle, instead of illustrating its limitations by an image.  Now I will not explain any farther, still less defend, and least of all attack, but simply quote a few lines from one of my friend’s poems, printed more than ten years ago, and ask the distinguished gentleman where he has ever asserted more strongly or absolutely the independent will of the “subcreative centre,” as my heretical friend has elsewhere called man.

   —­Thought, conscience, will, to make them all thy own
     He rent a pillar from the eternal throne! 
   —­Made in His image, thou must nobly dare
     The thorny crown of sovereignty to share. 
   —­Think not too meanly of thy low estate;
     Thou hast a choice; to choose is to create!

If he will look a little closely, he will see that the profile and the full-face views of the will are both true and perfectly consistent!

Now let us come back, after this long digression, to the conversation with the intelligent Englishman.  We begin skirmishing with a few light ideas,—­testing for thoughts,—­as our electro-chemical friend, De Sauty, if there were such a person, would test for his current; trying a little litmus-paper for acids, and then a slip of turmeric-paper for alkalies, as chemists do with unknown compounds; flinging the lead, and looking at the shells and sands it brings up to find out whether we are like to keep in shallow water, or shall have to drop the deep-sea line;—­in short, seeing what we have to deal with.  If the Englishman gets his H’s pretty well placed, he comes from one of the higher grades of the British social order, and we shall find him a good companion.

But, after all, here is a great fact between us.  We belong to two different civilizations, and, until we recognize what separates us, we are talking like Pyramus and Thisbe, without any hole in the wall to talk through.  Therefore, on the whole, if he were a superior fellow, incapable of mistaking it for personal conceit, I think I would let out the fact of the real American feeling about Old-World folks.  They are children to us in certain points of view.  They are playing with toys we have done with for whole-generations.