American poet & diplomat (1819-1891)
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.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Epistle to George William Curtis
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"Abraham Lincoln", Political Essays
Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Rousseau and the Sentimentalists
Ef you want peace, the thing you've gut tu du
Is jes' to show you're up to fightin', tu.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
The Biglow Papers
Folks never understand the folks they hate.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
The Biglow Papers
Walking the New Earth,
Lo, a Divine One
Greets all men godlike,
Calls them his kindred,
He, the Divine.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"The Voyage to Vinland"
The pennoned reeds, that, as the west-wind blew,
Gleamed and sighed plaintively, as if they knew
What music slept enchanted in each stem,
Till Pan should choose some happy one of them,
And with wise lips enlife it through and through.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"Invita Minerva"
And as nearer and ever nearer
I felt the throb of your tread,
To be in the world grew dearer,
And my blood ran rosier red.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"Telepathy"
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.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Jeffries Wyman
Softly comes Old Age, the thief,
Steals the rapture, leaves the throes.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"Scherzo"
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Dryden
Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
New England Two Centuries Ago
Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Rousseau and the Sentimentalists
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.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"Stanzas on Freedom"
The disjoining of deed from will, of practice from theory, is to put asunder what God has joined by an indissoluble sacrament. The soul must be tainted before the action become corrupt; and there is no self-delusion more fatal than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is groveling and sensual.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"Rousseau", Literary Essays
Praise follows truth afar off, and only overtakes her at the grave.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Conversations on Some of the Old Poets
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.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
The Biglow Papers
All thoughts that mould the age begin
Deep down within the primitive soul.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
An Incident in a Railroad Car
If there breathe on earth a slave,
Are ye truly free and brave?
If ye do not feel the chain,
When it works a brother's pain,
Are ye not base slaves indeed,
Slaves unworthy to be freed?
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"Stanzas on Freedom"
But all God's angels come to us disguised: sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, one after other lift their frowning masks, and we behold the Seraph's face beneath, all radiant with the glory and the calm of having looked upon the front of God.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"On the Death of a Friend's Child"