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Updated: June 21, 2025
Choate's mind was so complex, peculiar, and original, so foreign in temperament and spirit to the more representative traits of New England character, so large, philosophic, and sagacious in vision and survey of great questions, and so dramatic and vehement in their exposition and enforcement, so judicial and conservative in always maintaining in his arguments the balance and relation of interdependent principles, and so often in details marring the most exquisite poetry with the wildest extravagancies of style, so free from mere vulgar tricks of effect, and so full of imaginative tricksiness and surprises, so mischievous, subtle, mysterious, elusive, Protean, that it is no wonder he has been more admired and more misunderstood than any eminent American of his time.
Something lifted and rolled away. For one single second I understood clearly that the past and the future exist actually side by side in one immense Present; that it was I who moved to and fro among shifting, protean appearances. The old man dropped his eyes from my face, and the momentary glimpse of a mightier universe passed utterly away. Reason regained its sway over a dull, limited kingdom.
I have thoughts of a venturesome and lonely journey by moonlight, in and out of the chimney stacks, and all the way to the distant mountains. It looks inviting, and possible, by moonlight. And, indeed, any bright day in summer, from my window, Dockland with its goblin-like chimneys might be the enchanted country of a child's dream, where shapes, though inanimate, are watchful and protean.
Like the one force which scientists now are beginning to think underlies all the various manifestations of energy in nature, whether they be named light, heat, motion, electricity, chemical action, or gravitation, the one same vision of the throned God, manifest in Jesus Christ, is protean.
To write currente calamo for the mere pastime of author and readers, without aiming to inculcate some regenerative principle, or to photograph some valuable phase of protean truth, was in her estimation ignoble; for her high standard demanded that all books should be to a certain extent didactic, wandering like evangels among the people, and making some man, woman, or child happier, or wiser, or better more patient or more hopeful by their utterances.
It was coming in at that moment or so a porter told me. Our protean enemy took his most fearful form in the War when he became a Hidden Hand. Was this porter an agent of the gods for whose eternal leisure our daily confusion and bad temper make an amusing diversion?
Suffice it here, however, for the present to note that such differentiation does take place, without entering into the classification and comparison of the protean types of patrician and plebeian throughout geography and history.
But whatever these details may be, whether they are details of scheme or argument, the essential element of each is the omission of some fundamental fact or, rather, of one protean fact by which socialistic thinkers are often honestly confused, because it assumes, as they shift their positions, any number of different aspects.
Most of us, by the Protean quality of man, can talk to some degree with all; but the true talk, that strikes out all the slumbering best of us, comes only with the peculiar brethren of our spirits, is founded as deep as love in the constitution of our being, and is a thing to relish with all our energy, while, yet we have it, and to be grateful for forever.
The same life is strength in the arm, pliancy in the fingers, swiftness in the foot, light in the eye, music on the lips; so the same grace is Protean in its forms, and to His servants who trust Him Christ ever says, 'What would ye that I should do unto you? Be it even as thou wilt. The same mysterious power lives in the swaying branch, and in the veined leaf, and in the blushing clusters.
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