James Russell Lowell: Use

“God, give us Peace! not such as lulls to sleep,
But sword on thigh and brow with purpose knit!”

James Russell Lowell

The Washers of the Shroud, st. 20
Context: God, give us Peace! not such as lulls to sleep,
But sword on thigh and brow with purpose knit!
And let our Ship of State to harbor sweep,
Her ports all up, her battle lanterns lit,
And her leashed thunders gathering for their leap.

God , Peace , Sleep

“To be told that we ought not to agitate the question of Slavery, when it is that which is forever agitating us, is like telling a man with the fever and ague on him to stop shaking and he will be cured. The discussion of Slavery is said to be dangerous, but dangerous to what?…Discussion is the very life of free institutions, the fruitful mother of all political and moral enlightenment, and yet the question of all questions must be tabooed.”

James Russell Lowell

The Election in November 1860 (1860)

Life , Question

“Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.”

James Russell Lowell

Cambridge Thirty Years Ago.
Literary Essays, vol. I (1864-1890)

“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)

Truth , World , Faith , Nature

“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'".

Books , Sense , Time

“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.
Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/1169/ (July 21, 1865)

Nature

“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)

Fashion

“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)