James Russell Lowell (1819 – 1891)
American Romantic poet, critic, satirist, writer, diplomat, and abolitionist.
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.
Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.
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.
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!
Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The thing we long for, that we are
For one transcendent moment.