From “The Biglow Papers,” No. III.
GUVENER B. 1 is a sensible man;
He stays to his home an’ looks arter his folks;
He draws his furrer ez straight ez he can,
An’ into nobody’s tater-patch pokes;—
But John P.
Robinson he...
James Russell Lowell
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From “a Fable for Critics”
THERE are truths you Americans need to be told,
And it never ’ll refute them to swagger and scold;
John Bull, looking o’er the Atlantic, in choler.
At your aptness for trade, says you worship the dollar;
But to scorn i-dollar-try... -
From “a Fable for Critics”
LET us glance for a moment, ’t is well worth the pains,
And note what an average grave-yard contains;
There lie levellers levelled, duns done up themselves,
There are booksellers finally laid on their shelves,
Horizontally there... -
“Some time afterward, it was reported to me by the city officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor; that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a few very insignificant persons of all colors.”
—Letter of H. G. OTIS... -
[From “Under the Elm,” read at Cambridge, July 3, 1875, on the Hundredth Anniversary of Washington’s taking Command of the American Army.]
BENEATH our consecrated elm
A century ago he stood,
Famed vaguely for that old fight in the wood,
Which redly foamèd round... -
It don’t seem hardly right, John,
When both my hands was full,
To stump me to a fight, John,—
Your cousin, tu, John Bull!
Old Uncle S., sez he, “I guess
We know it now,” sez he,
“The Lion’s paw is all the law,
Accordin’ to J. B.,... -
When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth’s aching breast
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west,
And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb
To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime
Of a... -
On His Birthday, 27th February, 1867
I NEED not praise the sweetness of his song,
Where limpid verse to limpid verse succeeds
Smooth as our Charles, when, fearing lest he wrong
The new moon’s mirrored skiff, he slides along,
Full without noise, and... -
From “a Fable for Critics”
THERE is Lowell, who ’s striving Parnassus to climb
With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme.
He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders,
But he can’t with that bundle he has on his shoulders.
The top of the... -
These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,
Each softly lucent as a rounded moon;
The diver Omar plucked them from their bed,
Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.Fit rosary for a queen, in shape and hue,
When Contemplation tells her...