Love Quote by Donald G. Mitchell

Mitchell is trying to rescue “character” from both fatalism and self-congratulation. He grants the Victorian comfort that goodness is real, ambient, and partly unearned: it comes “from above, and from around.” That phrasing does double work. “Above” nods to Providence and moral law; “around” points to the quieter forces of family, community, and cultural air. Your heart, he suggests, is not a sealed private vault. It is forecasted by the moral weather you’ve absorbed and the grace you’ve been given.

Then he yanks the rug: “but a way foreshadowed is not a way made.” The sentence pivots from prediction to responsibility. Foreshadowing is the language of novels and sermons, where the ending feels inevitable because the author is arranging it. Mitchell denies us that narrative convenience. Having an inclination toward good, being raised near decency, even feeling the tug of the divine, doesn’t build a life. It only sketches the outline.

The subtext is a critique of passive piety and respectable sentimentality: the person who believes that good intentions or “good stock” count as moral achievement. Mitchell wrote in a 19th-century American moral landscape steeped in Protestant self-scrutiny and reform movements, where people loved to read their own virtue as destiny. He’s saying: yes, you may have signs, advantages, even grace; none of it substitutes for action. The heart can be hinted at. The road still has to be laid, step by deliberate step.