Clear overhead (God’s still imaginings),
Shining like Hope, through very darkness bright,
Star follows star, till heaven is all alight.
ECCENTRIC AMERICANS.
By COLEMAN E. BISHOP.
VII.—THE WELL-BALANCED ECCENTRIC.
At length we have an Eccentric American who was practical, successful, useful, and happy; who was a conservative radical, a laughing philanthropist, a non-resisting hero, a lovely fighting Quaker, the popular champion of an unpopular cause, and—most singular of all!—a Christian in fact and act, though counted a heretic by evangelicals, and excommunicated by his own sect. It is just because his life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him, that Isaac T. Hopper takes rank as one of the grandest and rarest of Eccentrics. For, as the reader may know, we have declared from the outset of this series that the true man in a false world is necessarily eccentric; that uniformity is always at the expense of principle. “Ay, sir; to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out often thousand.” And isn’t that odd?