James Russell Lowell (1819 – 1891)
American Romantic poet, critic, satirist, writer, diplomat, and abolitionist.
Nature fits all her children with something to do,
He who would write and can't write, can surely review.
There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.
A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.
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.
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
It's 'most enough to make a deacon swear.
The one thet fust gits mad 's 'most ollers wrong.
Like streams that keep a summer mind
Snow-hid in Jenooary.
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.
The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.
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.