James Russell Lowell: Trending quotes

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James Russell Lowell: 350 quotes9 likes

“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.”

James Russell Lowell

Prelude to Pt. I, st. 4
The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848)

“The thing we long for, that we are
For one transcendent moment.”

James Russell Lowell

Longing

“The encroachments of Slavery upon our national policy have been like those of a glacier in a Swiss valley. Inch by inch, the huge dragon with his glittering scales and crests of ice coils itself onward, an anachronism of summer, the relic of a bygone world where such monsters swarmed. But it has its limit, the kindlier forces of Nature work against it, and the silent arrows of the sun are still, as of old, fatal to the frosty Python. Geology tells us that such enormous devastators once covered the face of the earth, but the benignant sunlight of heaven touched them, and they faded silently, leaving no trace but here and there the scratches of their talons, and the gnawed boulders scattered where they made their lair. We have entire faith in the benignant influence of Truth, the sunlight of the moral world, and believe that slavery, like other worn-out systems, will melt gradually before it.”

James Russell Lowell

The Election in November 1860 (1860)

“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.”

James Russell Lowell

No. 6, st. 7
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series I (1848)

“I don't believe in princerple,
But oh I du in interest.”

James Russell Lowell

No. 6, st. 9
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series I (1848)

“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.”

James Russell Lowell

In a Copy of Omar Khayyam.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: 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.

“What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticised for us!”

James Russell Lowell

Variant: What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticised for us!
Source: My Study Windows (1871), chapter "Library of Old Authors'".

“It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of intelligence.”

James Russell Lowell

Democracy and Other Addresses (1886)

“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!”

James Russell Lowell

St. 8. <br class="br"> Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/1169/ (July 21, 1865)

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

James Russell Lowell

St. 5. <br class="br"> Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/1169/ (July 21, 1865)

“Earth's biggest country 's gut her soul,
An' risen up earth's greatest nation.”

James Russell Lowell

No. 7.
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series II (1866)

“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.”

James Russell Lowell

On Democracy (6 October 1884)

“Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.”

James Russell Lowell

Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890), 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.”

James Russell Lowell

Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890), New England Two Centuries Ago

“A marciful Providunce fashioned us holler
O' purpose thet we might our principles swaller.”

James Russell Lowell

No. 4, st. 2.
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series I (1848)

“It is the tendency of all creeds, opinions, and political dogmas that have once defined themselves in institutions to become inoperative.”

James Russell Lowell

The Election in November 1860 (1860)

“His heart kep' goin' pity-pat,
But hern went pity-Zekle.”

James Russell Lowell

The Courtin' .
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series II (1866)

“Ef you take a sword an’ dror it,
An’ go stick a feller thru,
Guv’mint ain’t to answer for it,
God’ll send the bill to you.”

James Russell Lowell

No. 1, st. 3
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series I (1848)

“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?”

James Russell Lowell

On Democracy (6 October 1884)

“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.”

James Russell Lowell

The Changeling http://seacoastnh.com/poems/changeling2.html, st. 7 (1879)