In Emerson's famous essay Self-Reliance there's this sentence:
Fear never but you shall be consistent in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour.
I guess that this is a rather archaic and/or literary use of the word 'but', and that it's more or less similar to its use in 'It never rains but it pours'. (In which 'but' means 'without it being the case that'.) Is my hunch correct? If so, what does the sentence mean exactly? The combination of the imperative and 'but' makes this sentence difficult to follow.
Best Answer
Some editions of this essay add the word that, making it easier to parse:
Fear never is a synonym for never fear or fear not, so a more understandable rendition might be:
But serves to negate, so if we replace it with a different negation word—say, fail—we get:
Other usage examples: