It Is The Easiest Thing

Where Does Any Novelist Pick Up Any Character? For The Most Part, In Town, To Be Sure.

The Past Is The Textbook Of Tyrants; The Future The Bible Of The Free. Those Who Are Solely Governed By The Past Stand Like Lot's Wife, Crystallized In The Act Of Looking Backward, And Forever Incapable Of Looking Before.

When Beholding The Tranquil Beauty And Brilliancy Of The Ocean’s Skin, One Forgets The Tiger Heart That Pants Beneath It; And Would Not Willingly Remember That This Velvet Paw But Conceals A Remorseless Fang.

That Immaculate Manliness We Feel Within Ourselves, So Far Within Us, That It Remains Intact Though All The Outer Character Seem Gone; Bleeds With Keenest Anguish At The Undraped Spectacle Of A Valor-ruined Man.

Ah! The Best Righteousness Of Our Man-of-war World Seems But An Unrealized Ideal, After All; And Those Maxims Which, In The Hope Of Bringing About A Millennium, We Busily Teach To The Heathen, We Christians Ourselves Disregard.