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James Russell Lowell Quotes
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James Russell Lowell was an American Romantic poet, critic, editor, and diplomat. He is associated with the Fireside Poets, a group of New England writers who were among the first American poets that rivaled the popularity of British poets. These writers usually used conventional forms and meters in their poetry, making them suitable for families entertaining at their fireside.

Lowell graduated from Harvard College in 1838, despite his reputation as a troublemaker, and went on to earn a law degree from Harvard Law School. He published his first collection of poetry in 1841 and married Maria White in 1844. The couple had several children, though only one survived past childhood.

He became involved in the movement to abolish slavery, with Lowell using poetry to express his anti-slavery views and taking a job in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as the editor of an abolitionist newspaper. After moving back to Cambridge, Lowell was one of the founders of a journal called The Pioneer, which lasted only three issues. He gained notoriety in 1848 with the publication of A Fable for Critics, a book-length poem satirizing contemporary critics and poets. The same year, he published The Biglow Papers, which increased his fame. He went on to publish several other poetry collections and essay collections throughout his literary career.

Maria died in 1853, and Lowell accepted a professorship of languages at Harvard in 1854. He traveled to Europe before officially assuming his teaching duties in 1856, and married Frances Dunlap shortly thereafter in 1857. That year, Lowell also became editor of The Atlantic Monthly. He continued to teach at Harvard for twenty years.

He received his first political appointment, the ambassadorship to the Kingdom of Spain 20 years later. He was later appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James's. He spent his last years in Cambridge in the same estate where he was born, and died there in 1891.

Lowell believed that the poet played an important role as a prophet and critic of society. He used poetry for reform, particularly in abolitionism. However, his commitment to the anti-slavery cause wavered over the years, as did his opinion on African-Americans. He attempted to emulate the true Yankee accent in the dialogue of his characters, particularly in The Biglow Papers. This depiction of the dialect, as well as his many satires, was an inspiration to writers such as Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken.



Wikipedia  

✵ 22. February 1819 – 12. August 1891
James Russell Lowell photo
James Russell Lowell: 175   quotes 8   likes

James Russell Lowell Quotes

“Ez to my princerples, I glory
In hevin' nothin' o' the sort.”

James Russell Lowell

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

“The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers, is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience.”

James Russell Lowell

Abraham Lincoln (1864)

Faith , Color , Weather

“When I was a beggarly boy,
And lived in a cellar damp,
I had not a friend nor a toy,
But I had Aladdin's lamp.”

James Russell Lowell

Aladdin, st. 1 (1868)

Boy

“Zekle crep' up quite unbeknown
An' peeked in thru' the winder,
An there sot Huldy all alone,
'ith no one nigh to hender.”

James Russell Lowell

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

“All kin' o' smily round the lips,
An' teary round the lashes.”

James Russell Lowell

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

“You've gut to git up airly
Ef you want to take in God.”

James Russell Lowell

No. 1, st. 2
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series I (1848)

God

“My gran'ther's rule was safer 'n 'tis to crow:
Don't never prophesy — onless ye know.”

James Russell Lowell

No. 2.
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series II (1866)

“The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accurst.”

James Russell Lowell

Interview with Miles Standish.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Folks never understand the folks they hate.”

James Russell Lowell

No. 2.
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series II (1866)

Hate , Understanding

“Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,
First pledge of blithesome [[May],
Which children pluck, and, full of pride uphold.”

James Russell Lowell

To the Dandelion http://www.gaygardener.com/poems/gpoem072.phtml, st. 1

Children , Way , Flowers

“New times demand new measures and new men;
The world advances, and in time outgrows
The laws which in our father's times were best;
And doubtless, after us, some purer scheme
Will be shaped out by wiser men than we,
Made wiser by the steady growth of truth.”

James Russell Lowell

A Glance Behind the Curtain (1843)

Men , Truth , World , Law

“Earth’s noblest thing, — a woman perfected.”

James Russell Lowell

Irené

Perfection

“The clear, sweet singer with the crown of snow
Not whiter than the thoughts that housed below.”

James Russell Lowell

Epistle to George William Curtis (1874)

Housing

“The democratic theory is that those Constitutions are likely to prove steadiest which have the broadest base, that the right to vote makes a safety - valve of every voter, and that the best way of teaching a man how to vote is to give him the chance of practice. For the question is no longer the academic one, "Is it wise to give every man the ballot?" but rather the practical one, "Is it prudent to deprive whole classes of it any longer?" It may be conjectured that it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that the ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong in their heads.”

James Russell Lowell

On Democracy (6 October 1884)

Men , Way , Question , Sense

“Of my merit
On thet pint you yourself may jedge;
All is, I never drink no sperit,
Nor I haint never signed no pledge.”

James Russell Lowell

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

Drink

“Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.”

James Russell Lowell

Democracy and Other Addresses (1886)

“One of the most curious of these frenzies of exclusion was that against the emancipation of the Jews. All share in the government of the world was denied for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most tenacious, race that had ever lived in it - the race to whom we owed our religion and the purest spiritual stimulus and consolation to be found in all literature - a race in which ability seems as natural and hereditary as the curve of their noses, and whose blood, furtively mingling with the bluest bloods in Europe, has quickened them with its own indomitable impulsion.”

James Russell Lowell

On Democracy (6 October 1884)

World , Religion , Literature , Nature

“There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.”

James Russell Lowell

On Democracy (6 October 1884)
Context: There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat. And in this case, also, the prudent will prepare themselves to encounter what they cannot prevent. Some people advise us to put on the brakes, as if the movement of which we are conscious were that of a railway train running down an incline. But a metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home and imbed it in the memory.

“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.”

James Russell Lowell

On Democracy (6 October 1884)

War , Children , Question , Learning

“No man is born into the world whose work
Is not born with him. There is always work,
And tools to work withal, for those who will;
And blessed are the horny hands of toil.”

James Russell Lowell

A Glance Behind the Curtain (1843)

World

“Ef you want peace, the thing you've gut tu du
Is jes' to show you're up to fightin', tu.”

James Russell Lowell

No. 2.
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series II (1866)

Peace

“A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.”

James Russell Lowell

Shakespeare Once More
Literary Essays, vol. III (1870-1890)

“Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us;
The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in,
The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us,
We bargain for the graves we lie in;
At the Devil's booth are all things sold
Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold.”

James Russell Lowell

Prelude to Pt. I, st. 3
The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848)

Lie

“An umbrella is of no avail against a Scotch mist.”

James Russell Lowell

On a Certain Condesceneion in Foreigners
Literary Essays, vol. III (1870-1890)

“Like streams that keep a summer mind
Snow-hid in Jenooary.”

James Russell Lowell

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

Summer

“In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual. Nothing can absolve us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens, and therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers. For, though during its term of office the government be practically as independent of the popular will as that of Russia, yet every fourth year the people are called upon to pronounce upon the conduct of their affairs.”

James Russell Lowell

The Election in November 1860 (1860)

People , History , Question , Box

“There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.”

James Russell Lowell A Fable for Critics

Pt. VI - Poe and Longfellow, st. 1
A Fable for Critics (1848)

“It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested.”

James Russell Lowell

Abraham Lincoln http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/1lncn10h.htm (1864)

“Ye come and go incessant; we remain
Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past;
Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot,
Of faith so nobly realized as this.”

James Russell Lowell

The Cathedral, st. 9 (1869)

Faith , Past

“Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.”

James Russell Lowell

"On the Capture of Certain Fugitive Slaves Near Washington" (1845)

Men , Nature

“One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.”

James Russell Lowell

Shakespeare once more
Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890)

“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.”

James Russell Lowell A Fable for Critics

Pt. V - Cooper, st. 3
A Fable for Critics (1848)

Thinking , Freedom , Strong

“Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,
And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.”

James Russell Lowell The Present Crisis

St. 11
The Present Crisis (1844)

Truth , Faith

“There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not sooner or later responded.”

James Russell Lowell

Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890), Rousseau and the Sentimentalists

Soul , Heart

“This goin' ware glory waits ye haint one agreeable feetur.”

James Russell Lowell

No. 2, st. 6
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series I (1848)

Waiting

“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.”

James Russell Lowell

An Incident in a Railroad Car

Soul , Star

“Sentiment is intellectualized emotion, — emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.”

James Russell Lowell

Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890), Rousseau and the Sentimentalists

“She thought no v'ice hed sech a swing
Ez hisn in the choir;
My! when he made Ole Hunderd ring
She knowed the Lord was nigher.”

James Russell Lowell

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

“We are persuaded that the election of Mr. Lincoln will do more than anything else to appease the excitement of the country. He has proved both his ability and his integrity; he has had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician.”

James Russell Lowell

The Election in November 1860 (1860)

Country

“To win the secret of a weed’s plain heart.”

James Russell Lowell

Sonnet XXV
Sonnets (1844)

Secret , Heart

“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.”

James Russell Lowell

A Moosehead Journal.
Literary Essays, vol. I (1864-1890)

Thinking , Reading

“Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.”

James Russell Lowell

A Few Bits of Roman Mosaic.
Literary Essays, vol. I (1864-1890)

Past

“From lower to the higher next,
Not to the top, is Nature’s text;
And embryo Good, to reach full stature,
Absorbs the Evil in its nature.”

James Russell Lowell

Festina Lente, Moral

Nature , Evil

“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.”

James Russell Lowell

Before the U. S. Senate Committee on Patents (29 January 1886)

Books

“A reading-machine, always wound up and going,
He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.”

James Russell Lowell A Fable for Critics

Prologue, st. 7
A Fable for Critics (1848)

Reading

“Not failure, but low aim, is crime.”

James Russell Lowell

For an Autograph, st. 5 (1868)

Failure

“Our Pilgrim stock wuz pithed with hardihood.”

James Russell Lowell

No. 6.
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series II (1866)

“Two meanings have our lightest fantasies, —
One of the flesh, and of the spirit one.”

James Russell Lowell

Sonnet XXXIV
Sonnets (1844)