ecause
I seldom have any consideration for _expediency_--what I should call
_secondary_ rules of conduct; and I have not much objection to
contradicting my course of action in the present hour by that of the
next, provided at each time I am endeavoring to do what seems best to
me. I desire a certain _frame of mind_ that my conduct may flow
habitually from it, without constant reference to outward coherency. In
the course of life-long endeavor and practice, I suppose, this may be
achieved. But do not think me presumptuous if I say that I think people
are generally too afraid of appearing inconsistent, too desirous to seem
reasonable,--in short, more anxious upon the whole about what they _do_
than what they _are_. Of course, the one will much depend upon the
other; but they will _match_ well enough without an everlasting
comparison of shades of color, if they are really in harmony, and, at
all events, will certainly _harmonize_ even if they do not precisely
_match_: there's a woman's shopping illustration for you.... Of course
you will understand well enough that I have not referred to the capital
inconsistency of which poor St. Paul so pathetically complained--wishing
to do right and doing wrong,--nor would you have charged me individually
and specially with this, alas! universal moral incoherency.

This is my holiday, and I have been spending it between two famous
nursery-gardens in the neighborhood of Exeter, and the cathedral.

These great gardeners send up their exquisite and precious plants to the
London horticultural exhibitions, and I saw many for whose beauty and
variety gold and silver medals had been awarded to their foster-father
florists. The masters of both these establishments very courteously went
over them with me, showing me the hot-houses where their choicest and
rarest plants were kept; there were some, such exquisite and wonderful
creatures, lovely to the eye, delicious to the smell--Patagonians,
Javanese, from the Cordilleras, from Peru, from Chili, from Borneo,--the
flower tribes of the whole earth.

Then, again, they showed me little pots of fine sand, covered with bell
glasses, where the eye could hardly detect a point or shade of sickly
green upon the surface,--the promise of some _unique_ foreign flower,
sent from its savage home in the forests of another hemisphere, to
blossom at the Chiswick horticultural exhibition, and win medals for the
careful cultivators, who have watched with faith--a