American poet & diplomat (1819-1891)
Fate loves best such syllables as are sweet and sonorous on the tongue.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"Keats", Literary Essays
For Humanity sweeps onward: where today the martyr stands,
On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands;
Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn,
While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return
To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"The Present Crisis"
Life is the jailer, Death the angel sent
To draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"The Death of a Friend's Child"
To me it seems not unreasonable to find a re-enforcement of optimism, a renewal of courage and hope, in the modern theory that man has mounted to what he is from the lowest step of potentiality, through toilsome grades of ever-expanding existence, even though it have been by a spiral stairway, mainly dark or dusty, with loop-holes at long intervals only, and these granting but a narrow and one-sided view.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Progress of the World
Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mound of countless generations, and not from any top dressing capriciously scattered over the surface.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Literary Essays