James Russell Lowell
James Russell Lowell
James Russell Lowellwas 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 who rivaled the popularity of British poets. These poets usually used conventional forms and meters in their poetry, making them suitable for families entertaining at their fireside...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth22 February 1819
CountryUnited States of America
strong blue sky
Over all life broods Poesy, like the calm blue sky with its motherly, rebuking face. She is the great reformer, and where the love of her is strong and healthy, wickedness and wrong cannot long prevail.
peace want guts
Ef you want peace, the thing you've gut to du Is jes' to show you're up to fightin', tu.
history
History is clarified experience.
love eye angel
What a man pays for bread and butter is worth its market value, and no more. What he pays for love's sake is gold indeed, which has a lure for angels' eyes, and rings well upon God's touchstone.
men rivers heaven
The course of a great statesman resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the almost imperceptible slopes of national tendency, yet always aiming at direct advances, always recruited from sources nearer heaven, and sometimes bursting open paths of progress and fruitful human commerce through what seem the eternal barriers of both.
sight spirit grows
With every anguish of our earthly part The spirit's sight grows clearer.
poetry mastery logic
It ["The Ancient Mariner"] is marvellous in its mastery over that delightfully fortuitous inconsequence that is the adamantine logic of dreamland.
want guts
You've gut to git up airly Ef you want to take in God.
humanity traitor treason
The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accurst.
pride men heaven
Never did Poesy appear So full of heaven to me, as when I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear To the lives of coarsest men.
reading thinking mind
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.
wise character heart
A nature wise With finding in itself the types of all, With watching from the dim verge of the time What things to be are visible in the gleams Thrown forward on them from the luminous past, Wise with the history of its own frail heart, With reverence and sorrow, and with love, Broad as the world, for freedom and for man.
loyalty bravery may
Life may be given in many ways, and loyalty to truth be sealed as bravely in the closet as the field.
army greek march
It is not a great Xerxes army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand that march safely down to posterity.