Speculative men are wont to be condemned by the general. But who more speculative then Sir Walter Raleigh, and _he_, even he, brought the potato to Europe. Good heavens! let me never eat a roasted potato without dwelling on it, and detailing its train of consequences. Likewise, too, _dubious_ to the philosopher, but to be clapped chorally by the commercial world, he, this mere wild speculatist, introduced tobacco.
For a nation to make peace only because it is tired of war, and, as it were, in order just to take breath, is in direct subversion of the end and object of the war which was its sole justification. 'Tis like a poor way-sore foot traveller getting up behind a coach that is going the contrary way to his.
The eye hath a two-fold power. It is, verily, a window through which you not only look _out_ of the house, but can look into it too. A statesman and diplomatist should for this reason always wear spectacles.
Worldly men gain their purposes with worldly men by that instinctive belief in sincerity. Hence (nothing immediately and passionately contradicting it) the effect of the "with unfeigned esteem," "entire devotion," and the other smooth phrases in letters, all, in short, that sea-officers call _oil_, and of which they, with all their bluntness, well understand the use.
The confusion of metaphor with reality is one of the fountains of the many-headed Nile of credulity, which, overflowing its banks, covers the world with miscreations and reptile monsters, and feeds by its many mouths the sea of blood.
A ready command of a limited number of words is but a playing cat-cradle dexterously with language.
Plain contra-reasoning may be compared with boxing with fists. Controversy with boxing is the cestus, that is, the lead-loaded glove, like the pugilists in the Æneid. But the stiletto! the envenomed stiletto is here. What worse? (a Germanism) Yes! the poisoned Italian glove of mock friendship.
The more I reflect, the more exact and close appears to me the analogy between a watch and watches, and the conscience and consciences of men, on the one hand, and that between the sun and motion of the heavenly bodies in general and the reason and goodness of the Supreme on the other. Never goes quite right any one, no two go exactly the same; they derive their dignity and use as being substitutes and exponents of heavenly motions, but still, in a thousand instances, they are and must be our instructors by which we must act, in practice presuming a coincidence while theoretically we are aware of incalculable variations.