James Russell Lowell (1819 – 1891)
American Romantic poet, critic, satirist, writer, diplomat, and abolitionist.
Folks never understand the folks they hate.
Sentiment is intellectualized emotion, — emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.
The snow had begun in the gloaming,
And busily all the night
Had been heaping field and highway
With a silence deep and white.
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.
Not failure, but low aim, is crime.
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.
Our Pilgrim stock wuz pithed with hardihood.
Ef you want peace, the thing you've gut tu du
Is jes' to show you're up to fightin', tu.
For though he builds glorious temples, 'tis odd
He leaves never a doorway to get in a god.
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,
Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store,
Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it;
We are happy now because God wills it.
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.
Nature, they say, doth dote,
And cannot make a man
Save on some worn-out plan,
Repeating us by rote.
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.
It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested.
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.
You've gut to git up airly
Ef you want to take in God.
The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.
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.