
Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees Bending to counterfeit a breeze ... —
James Russell Lowell

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

Violet! sweet violet! Thine eyes are full of tears; Are they wet Even yet With the thought of other years? —
James Russell Lowell

Fools, when their roof-tree falls, think it doomsday. —
James Russell Lowell

Who speaks the truth stabs falsehood to the heart. —
James Russell Lowell

That best academy, a mother's knee. —
James Russell Lowell

To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift of life. —
James Russell Lowell

The opening of the first grammar school was the opening of the first trench against monopoly in Church and State. —
James Russell Lowell

Fate loves best such syllables as are sweet and sonorous on the tongue. —
James Russell Lowell

Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint. —
James Russell Lowell

No price is set on the lavish summer;
June may be had by the poorest comer. —
James Russell Lowell

He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing. —
James Russell Lowell

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor. —
James Russell Lowell

Two meanings have our lightest fantasies,- One of the flesh, and of the spirit one. —
James Russell Lowell

The English Puritans pulled down church and state to rebuild Zion on the ruins, and all the while it was not Zion, but America, they were building. —
James Russell Lowell

In vain we call old notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing; The Ten Commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing. —
James Russell Lowell

Our American republic will endure only as long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue dominant. —
James Russell Lowell

That pernicious sentiment, "Our country, right or wrong." —
James Russell Lowell

Aspiration sees only one side of every question; possession many. —
James Russell Lowell

God is not dumb, that he should speak no more;
If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness
And find'st not Sinai, 'tis thy soul is poor. —
James Russell Lowell

They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy. —
James Russell Lowell

For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions, Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions. —
James Russell Lowell

Not suffering, but faint heart, is worst of woes. —
James Russell Lowell

Each day the world is born anew for him who takes it rightly. —
James Russell Lowell

On Lincoln: A profound common sense is the best genius for statesmanship. —
James Russell Lowell

O visionary world, condition strange, Where naught abiding is but only change. —
James Russell Lowell

May is a pious fraud of the almanac A ghastly parody of real Spring Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind. —
James Russell Lowell

Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves. —
James Russell Lowell

There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends. —
James Russell Lowell

The thing we long for, that we are For one transcendent moment. —
James Russell Lowell

Once to every person and nation come the moment to decide. In the conflict of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side. —
James Russell Lowell

A word once vulgarized can never be rehabilitated. —
James Russell Lowell

Humbleness is always grace; always dignity —
James Russell Lowell

The green grass floweth like a stream
Into the oceans's blue. —
James Russell Lowell

May is a pious fraud of the almanac. —
James Russell Lowell

Love lives on, and hath a power to bless when they who loved are hidden in the grave. —
James Russell Lowell

Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof; it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship. —
James Russell Lowell

The material of thought re-acts upon the thought itself. —
James Russell Lowell

Not only around our infancy Doth heaven with all its splendors lie; Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, We Sinais climb and know it not. —
James Russell Lowell

Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving. —
James Russell Lowell

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

History is clarified experience. —
James Russell Lowell

That cause is strong which has, not a multitude, but one strong man behind it. —
James Russell Lowell

All that hath been majestical
In life or death, since time began,
Is native in the simple heart of all,
The angel heat of man. —
James Russell Lowell

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic. —
James Russell Lowell

God is the only being who has time enough; but a prudent man, who knows how to seize occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as much as he needs. —
James Russell Lowell

Time is, after all, the greatest of poets; and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs of Fame. —
James Russell Lowell

Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience all the passion of great hearts. —
James Russell Lowell

If God made poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful. —
James Russell Lowell

An angel stood and met my gaze, Through the low doorway of my tent; The tent is struck, the vision stays; I only know she came and went. —
James Russell Lowell

Comparative criticism teaches us that moral and aesthetic defects are more nearly related than is commonly supposed. —
James Russell Lowell

There is surely room for yet another schoolmaster when a score of seers advertise themselves in Boston newspapers. —
James Russell Lowell

Freedom is the only law which genius knows. —
James Russell Lowell

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run. —
James Russell Lowell

Not but wut abstract war is horrid, I sign to thet with all my heart, But civilysation doos git forrid Sometimes, upon a powder-cart. —
James Russell Lowell

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 friendship counting nearly forty years is the finest kind of shade-tree I know. —
James Russell Lowell

To have greatly dreamed precludes low ends. —
James Russell Lowell

Old gold has a civilizing virtue which new gold must grow old to be capable of secreting. —
James Russell Lowell

The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next. —
James Russell Lowell

In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking. —
James Russell Lowell

Children are God's Apostles, sent forth, day by day, to preach of love, and hope, and peace. —
James Russell Lowell

Many make the household but only one the home. —
James Russell Lowell

It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough. —
James Russell Lowell

Truly there is a tide in the affairs of men; but there is no gulf-stream setting forever in one direction. —
James Russell Lowell

The gift without the giver is rare. —
James Russell Lowell

Tiny Salmoneus of the air His mimic bolts the firefly threw. —
James Russell Lowell

We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage. —
James Russell Lowell

He gives only the worthless gold who gives from a sense of duty. —
James Russell Lowell

Keats longed for fame, but longed above all to deserve it. —
James Russell Lowell

Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free. —
James Russell Lowell