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James Russell Lowell

James Russell Lowell was an American Romantic poet, critic, satirist, writer, diplomat, and abolitionist.

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  • Earth’s noblest thing,—a woman perfected.
    • Irené

  • Who speaks the truth stabs Falsehood to the heart.
    • L’ Envoi

  • His words were simple words enough,
    And yet he used them so,
    That what in other mouths was rough
    In his seemed musical and low.

  • All thoughts that mould the age begin
    Deep down within the primitive soul.
    • An Incident in a Railroad Car

  • It may be glorious to write
    Thoughts that shall glad the two or three
    High souls, like those far stars that come in sight
    Once in a century.
    • An Incident in a Railroad Car

  • Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way,
    Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,
    First pledge of blithesome May,
    Which children pluck, and, full of pride uphold.

  • The thing we long for, that we are
    For one transcendent moment.
    • Longing

  • From lower to the higher next,
    Not to the top, is Nature’s text;
    And embryo Good, to reach full stature,
    Absorbs the Evil in its nature.
    • Festina Lente, Moral

  • No man is born into the world whose work
    Is not born with him. There is always work,
    And tools to work withal, for those who will;
    And blessed are the horny hands of toil.
    • A Glance Behind the Curtain (1843)

  • They are slaves who fear to speak
    For the fallen and the weak;
    They are slaves who will not choose
    Hatred, scoffing, and abuse,
    Rather than in silence shrink
    From the truth they needs must think;
    They are slaves who dare not be
    In the right with two or three.

  • The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.
    • Columbus (1844)

  • I first drew in New England's air, and from her hardy breast
    Sucked in the tyrant-hating milk that will not let me rest.
    • On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves Near Washington, st. 2 (1845)

  • Before man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.
    • On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves Near Washington

  • The birch, most shy and lady-like of trees,
    Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves,
    And hints at her foregone gentilities
    With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves.

  • They came three thousand miles, and died,
    To keep the Past upon its throne;
    Unheard, beyond the ocean tide,
    Their English mother made her moan.
    • Graves of Two English Soldiers on Concord Battleground, st. 3 (1849)

  • The snow had begun in the gloaming,
    And busily all the night
    Had been heaping field and highway
    With a silence deep and white.

  • Along A River-Side, I Know Not Where,
    I walked one night in mystery of dream;
    A chill creeps curdling yet beneath my hair,
    To think what chanced me by the pallid gleam
    Of a moon-wraith that waned through haunted air.

  • God, give us Peace! not such as lulls to sleep,
    But sword on thigh and brow with purpose knit!
    And let our Ship of State to harbor sweep,
    Her ports all up, her battle lanterns lit,
    And her leashed thunders gathering for their leap.
    • The Washers of the Shroud, st. 20

  • There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.
    • Fireside Travels, At Sea (1864)

  • It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested.

  • When I was a beggarly boy,
    And lived in a cellar damp,
    I had not a friend nor a toy,
    But I had Aladdin's lamp.
    • Aladdin, st. 1 (1868)

  • Not failure, but low aim, is crime.
    • For an Autograph, st. 5 (1868)

  • Though old the thought and oft expressed,
    'Tis his at last who says it best.
    • For an Autograph

  • Ye come and go incessant; we remain
    Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past;
    Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot,
    Of faith so nobly realized as this.
    • The Cathedral, st. 9 (1869)

  • How little inventiveness there is in man,
    Grave copier of copies, I give thanks
    For a new relish, careless to inquire
    My pleasure's pedigree, if so it please,
    Nobly, I mean, nor renegade to art.
    The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness,
    Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained,
    The one thing finished in this hasty world,
    Forever finished, though the barbarous pit,
    Fanatical on hearsay, stamp and shout
    As if a miracle could be encored.
    • The Cathedral, st. 9

  • The wisest man could ask no more of Fate
    Than to be simple, modest, manly, true,
    Safe from the Many—honored by the Few;
    To count as naught in World or Church or State;
    But inwardly in secret to be great.
    • Sonnet, Jeffries Wyman (1874)

  • But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet
    Lessen like sound of friends’ departing feet;
    And Death is beautiful as feet of friend
    Coming with welcome at our journey’s end.
    For me Fate gave, whate’er she else denied,
    A nature sloping to the southern side;
    I thank her for it, though when clouds arise
    Such natures double-darken gloomy skies.
    • Epistle to George William Curtis (1874)

  • The Maple puts her corals on in May,
    While loitering frosts about the lowlands cling,
    To be in tune with what the robins sing.

  • The child is not mine as the first was,
    I cannot sing it to rest,
    I cannot lift it up fatherly
    And bliss it upon my breast;
    Yet it lies in my little one's cradle
    And sits in my little one's chair,
    And the light of the heaven she's gone to
    Transfigures its golden hair.

  • The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and to be buried in.
    • Garfield (September 24, 1881)

  • In vain we call old notions fudge,
    And bend our conscience to our dealing;
    The Ten Commandments will not budge,
    And stealing will continue stealing.
    • International Copyright (November 20, 1885)

  • If I were asked what book is better than a cheap book, I should answer that there is one book better than a cheap book,—and that is a book honestly come by.
    • Before the U. S. Senate Committee on Patents (January 29, 1886)

  • These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,
    Each softly lucent as a rounded moon;
    The diver Omar plucked them from their bed,
    Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.

  • As life runs on, the road grows strange
    With faces new, and near the end
    The milestones into headstones change,
    'Neath every one a friend.
    • Sixty-eighth Birthday (1889)

Sonnets (1844)

  • Be noble! and the nobleness that lies
    In other men, sleeping but never dead,
    Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.
    • Sonnet IV

  • Great truths are portions of the soul of man;
    Great souls are portions of eternity.
    • Sonnet VI

  • To win the secret of a weed’s plain heart.
    • Sonnet XXV

  • Two meanings have our lightest fantasies,—
    One of the flesh, and of the spirit one.
    • Sonnet XXXIV

The Present Crisis (1844)

  • Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
    In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side.
    • St. 5

  • Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—
    Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
    Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
    • St. 8

  • Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes,-they were souls that stood alone,
    While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,
    Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline
    To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,
    By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design.
    • St. 12

  • New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
    They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth
    Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,
    Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
    Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.
    • St. 18

The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848)

  • Not only around our infancy
    Doth heaven with all its splendors lie;
    Daily, with souls that cringe and plot,
    We Sinais climb and know it not.
    • Prelude to Pt. I, st. 2

  • For a cap and bells our lives we pay,
    Bubbles we earn with a whole soul's tasking:
    'Tis heaven alone that is given away,
    'Tis only God may be had for the asking.
    • Prelude to Pt. I, st. 4

  • And what is so rare as a day in June?
    Then, if ever, come perfect days;
    Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune,
    And over it softly her warm ear lays:
    Whether we look, or whether we listen,
    We hear life murmur, or see it glisten;
    Every clod feels a stir of might,
    An instinct within it that reaches and towers,
    And, grasping blindly above it for light,
    Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers.
    • Prelude to Pt. I, st. 5

  • Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it;
    We are happy now because God wills it.
    • Prelude to Pt. I, st. 6

  • Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how;
    Everything is happy now,
    Everything is upward striving;
    'Tis as easy now for the heart to be true
    As for grass to be green or skies to be blue,—
    'Tis the natural way of living:
    Who knows whither the clouds have fled?
    In the unscarred heaven they leave no wake;
    And the eyes forget the tears they have shed,
    The heart forgets its sorrow and ache;
    The soul partakes the season's youth,
    And the sulphurous rifts of passion and woe
    Lie deep 'neath a silence pure and smooth,
    Like burnt-out craters healed with snow.
    • Prelude to Pt. I, st. 7

  • The Holy Supper is kept, indeed,
    In whatso we share with another's need,—
    Not that which we give, but what we share,—
    For the gift without the giver is bare;
    Who bestows himself with his alms feeds three,—
    Himself, his hungering neighbor, and me.
    • Pt. II, st. 8

A Fable for Critics (1848)

  • In creating, the only hard thing's to begin;
    A grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak,
    If you've once found the way you've achieved the grand stroke.
    • Pt. I - Emerson, st. 1

  • And I honor the man who is willing to sink
    Half his present repute for the freedom to think,
    And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
    Will risk t'other half for the freedom to speak.
    • Pt. V - Cooper, st. 3

  • There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
    Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.
    • Pt. VI - Poe and Longfellow, st. 1

  • For though he builds glorious temples, 'tis odd
    He leaves never a doorway to get in a god.

  • Nature fits all her children with something to do,
    He who would write and can't write, can surely review.

Series I (1848)

  • Ez fer war, I call it murder—
    There you hev it plain an' flat;
    I don't want to go no furder
    Than my Testyment fer that.
    • No. 1, st. 5

  • You've gut to git up airly
    Ef you want to take in God.
    • No. 1, st. 5

  • This goin' ware glory waits ye haint one agreeable feetur.
    • No. 2, st. 6

  • Gineral C. is a dreffle smart man;
    He’s ben on all sides thet give places or pelf;
    But consistency still wuz a part of his plan,—
    He’s ben true to one party, an’ thet is himself.
    • No. 2

  • A marciful Providunce fashioned us holler
    O' purpose thet we might our principles swaller.
    • No. 4, st. 2

  • I du believe with all my soul
    In the gret Press's freedom,
    To pint the people to the goal
    An' in the traces lead 'em.
    • No. 6, st. 7

  • I don't believe in princerple,
    But oh I du in interest.
    • No. 6, st. 9

  • It ain't by princerples nor men
    My preudunt course is steadied—
    I scent wich pays the best, an' then
    Go into it baldheaded.
    • No. 6, st. 10

Series II (1866)

  • God makes sech nights, all white an' still,
    Fur'z you can look or listen,
    Moonshine an' snow on field an' hill,
    All silence an' all glisten.
    • The Courtin' , st. 1

  • My gran'ther's rule was safer 'n 'tis to crow:
    Don't never prophesy—onless ye know.
    • No. 2

  • It's 'most enough to make a deacon swear.
    • No. 2

  • Folks never understand the folks they hate.
    • No. 2

  • Ef you want peace, the thing you've gut tu du
    Is jes' to show you're up to fightin', tu.
    • No. 2

  • Bad work follers ye ez long's ye live.
    • No. 2

  • The surest plan to make a Man
    Is, think him so.
    • No. 2

  • Our papers don't purtend to print on'y wut Guv'ment choose,
    An' thet insures us all to git the very best o' noose.
    • No. 3

  • No, never say nothin' without you're compelled tu,
    An' then don't say nothin' thet you can be held tu.
    • No. 5

Literary Essays, vol. I (1864-1890)

  • Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.
    • A Few Bits of Roman Mosaic

  • Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.
    • Cambridge Thirty Years Ago

  • What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticized for us!
    • A Library of Old Authors

  • It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.
    • A Moosehead Journal

Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration (July 21, 1865)

  • Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides
    Into the silent hollow of the past;
    What is there that abides
    To make the next age better for the last?
    • St. 3

  • The little that we do
    Is but half-nobly true;
    With our laborious hiving
    What men call treasure, and the gods call dross,
    Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving,
    Only secure in every one's conniving,
    A long account of nothings paid with loss.
    • St. 3

  • Nature, they say, doth dote,
    And cannot make a man
    Save on some worn-out plan,
    Repeating us by rote.
    • St. 5

  • They come transfigured back,
    Secure from change in their high-hearted ways,
    Beautiful evermore, and with the rays
    Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation!
    • St. 8

Literary Essays, vol. II (1870-1890)

  • There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business.
    • New England Two Centuries Ago

  • Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.
    • New England Two Centuries Ago

  • It was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled.
    • New England Two Centuries Ago

  • Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.
    • Rousseau and the Sentimentalists

  • Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
    • Rousseau and the Sentimentalists

  • There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not sooner or later responded.
    • Rousseau and the Sentimentalists

  • Sentiment is intellectualized emotion,—emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.
    • Rousseau and the Sentimentalists

  • No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself.
    • Rousseau and the Sentimentalists

Literary Essays, vol. III (1870-1890)

  • An umbrella is of no avail against a Scotch mist.
    • On a Certain Condesceneion in Foreigners

  • Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
    • Dryden

  • A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.
    • Shakespeare Once More

On Democracy (October 6, 1884)

  • He must be a born leader or misleader of men, or must have been sent into the world unfurnished with that modulating and restraining balance - wheel which we call a sense of humor, who, in old age, has as strong a confidence in his opinions and in the necessity of bringing the universe into conformity with them as he had in youth. In a world the very condition of whose being is that it should be in perpetual flux, where all seems mirage, and the one abiding thing is the effort to distinguish realities from appearances, the elderly man must be indeed of a singularly tough and valid fibre who is certain that he has any clarified residuum of experience, any assured verdict of reflection, that deserves to be called an opinion, or who, even if he had, feels that he is justified in holding mankind by the button while he is expounding it.

  • I hear America sometimes playfully accused of sending you all your storms, and am in the habit of parrying the charge by alleging that we are enabled to do this because, in virtue of our protective system, we can afford to make better bad weather than anybody else. And what wiser use could we make of it than to export it in return for the paupers which some European countries are good enough to send over to us who have not attained to the same skill in the manufacture of them?

  • There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat. And in this case, also, the prudent will prepare themselves to encounter what they cannot prevent. Some people advise us to put on the brakes, as if the movement of which we are conscious were that of a railway train running down an incline. But a metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home and imbed it in the memory.

  • I have hinted that what people are afraid of in democracy is less the thing itself than what they conceive to be its necessary adjuncts and consequences. It is supposed to reduce all mankind to a dead level of mediocrity in character and culture, to vulgarize men's conceptions of life, and therefore their code of morals, manners, and conduct - to endanger the rights of property and possession. But I believe that the real gravamen of the charges lies in the habit it has of making itself generally disagreeable by asking the Powers that Be at the most inconvenient moment whether they are the powers that ought to be. If the powers that be are in a condition to give a satisfactory answer to this inevitable question, they need feel in no way discomfited by it.

  • Few people take the trouble of trying to find out what democracy really is. Yet this would be a great help, for it is our lawless and uncertain thoughts, it is the indefiniteness of our impressions, that fill darkness, whether mental or physical, with spectres and hobgoblins. Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.

  • The framers of the American Constitution were far from wishing or intending to found a democracy in the strict sense of the word, though, as was inevitable, every expansion of the scheme of government they elaborated has been in a democratical direction. But this has been generally the slow result of growth, and not the sudden innovation of theory; in fact, they had a profound disbelief in theory, and knew better than to commit the folly of breaking with the past. They were not seduced by the French fallacy that a new system of government could be ordered like a new suit of clothes. They would as soon have thought of ordering a new suit of flesh and skin. It is only on the roaring loom of time that the stuff is woven for such a vesture of their thought and experience as they were meditating. They recognized fully the value of tradition and habit as the great allies of permanence and stability. They all had that distaste for innovation which belonged to their race, and many of them a distrust of human nature derived from their creed.

  • Their problem was how to adapt English principles and precedents to the new conditions of American life, and they solved it with singular discretion. They put as many obstacles as they could contrive, not in the way of the people's will, but of their whim.

  • Their children learned the lesson of compromise only too well, and it was the application of it to a question of fundamental morals that cost us our civil war. We learned once for all that compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof; that it is a temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.

  • Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined.

  • The democratic theory is that those Constitutions are likely to prove steadiest which have the broadest base, that the right to vote makes a safety - valve of every voter, and that the best way of teaching a man how to vote is to give him the chance of practice. For the question is no longer the academic one, "Is it wise to give every man the ballot?" but rather the practical one, "Is it prudent to deprive whole classes of it any longer?" It may be conjectured that it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that the ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong in their heads.

  • An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

  • I do not believe in violent changes, nor do I expect them. Things in possession have a very firm grip. One of the strongest cements of society is the conviction of mankind that the state of things into which they are born is a part of the order of the universe, as natural, let us say, as that the sun should go round the earth. It is a conviction that they will not surrender except on compulsion, and a wise society should look to it that this compulsion be not put upon them. For the individual man there is no radical cure, outside of human nature itself, for the evils to which human nature is heir.

  • In the scales of the destinies brawn will never weigh so much as brain. Our healing is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies, or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed by the still small voice that speaks to the conscience and the heart, prompting us to a wider and wiser humanity.
 
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