Horace Elisha Scudder

“ All your life since you have been doing the great work. There is nothing right or holy done for others that is not great. The little daily duties that you did so faithfully; the little kindnesses you showed to others; the little pleasant words you spoke—these are all great things."
"But the Song of the Mountain?" asked Effie.
"Dear child," said he, "you have sung the song all your life. If you have thanked God for his goodness to you—if you have loved him for his love to you—if you have prayed to him to make you good and holy—you have sung the Song of the Mountain." ”

“ Are we basely content with our pecuniary good-fortune? Do we look on the tall column of figures on the credit side of our national ledger as a sufficing monument of our glory as a people? Are we of the North better off as provinces of the Slave-holding States than as colonies of Great Britain? Are we content with our share in the administration of national affairs, because we are to have the ministry to Austria, and because the newspapers promise that James Gordon Bennett shall be sent out of the country to fill it? ”

“ Surely the American (and I feel myself more intensely American every day) is last of all at home among ruins—but he is at home in Rome. I cannot help believing that in some respects we represent more truly the old Roman Power and sentiment than any other people. Our art, our literature, are, as theirs, in some sort exotics; but our genius for politics, for law, and, above all, for colonization, our instinct for aggrandizement and for trade, are all Roman. ”

“ But every day it grew easier to work, and Beauty grew stronger and rosier. When her work was done, she could read, or play on her harp, or sit at her spinning-wheel, singing as she spun.
As for her two sisters, they were idle and unhappy, and became quite helpless. They never got up till ten o’clock. They spent the day moping and fretting, because they no longer had fine clothes to wear, and could not go to fine parties. They jeered at Beauty, and said that she was nothing but a servant-girl after all, to like that kind of living. But Beauty did not mind them, and lived on cheerfully. ”

“ We ought not to consider ourselves as inhabitants of a particular State only, but as Americans, as the common subjects of a great empire. We cannot and ought not wholly to divest ourselves of provincial views and attachments, but we should subordinate them to the general interests of the continent. As a member of a family every individual has some domestic interests; as a member of a corporation he has other interests; as an inhabitant of a State he has a more extensive interest; as a citizen and subject of the American empire he has a national interest far superior to all others. ”

“ Passion is here, but it is not stormy, and love and tenderness, but they are not feeble and tearful. Depth of feeling and strength of character lie open to view in the firm lines, and the fine light and shade of the verse come incontrovertibly from a nature evenly poised, whose companionship must have been to Lowell that of a kindred spirit, capable indeed of guiding and not merely of seconding his resolves. ”

“ But it is not easy for men of this generation to realize the galling sense of humiliation which the men of Lowell’s day felt at the manner in which the general government was made subservient to the demands of the slave power. So conscious were they of the steady degeneration of the political sense, that they were scarcely aware of the counter force of the rising tide of anti-slavery and union sentiment, so that the great wave which swept over the North after the attack upon Sumter came with almost as much a surprise to them as to the South. ”

“ Morgridge who then spoke in a voice that had in it the cheeriness of Solomon Mit:—
"Come down, little Peter! To-day is Christmas Day. We must hurry through breakfast; for we've got twenty-five turkeys to carry to twenty-five honest poor folk. It will go hard with us, but we'll make shift to buy 'em. God bless you Peter Mit!" and may the Indian in front of the door tomahawk me if David Morgridge did not then and there, in his old, wheezy, snuff-choked voice, sing—
"All glory be to God on high,
And to the Earth be peace,
Good will, henceforth, from Heaven to men,
Begin and never cease!" ”

“ When will men learn that the only true conservatism lies in growth and progress, that whatever has ceased growing has begun to die? It is not the conservative, but the retarding element which resides in the pocket. It is droll to witness the fate of this conservatism when the ship of any state goes to pieces. It lashes itself firmly to the ponderous anchor it has provided for such an emergency, cuts all loose, and—goes to the bottom. There are a great many things to be done in this country, but the first is the abolition of slavery. ”

“ And all the voices sang with her
"Thus we work, thus we love ever while we live."
Then the procession moved out again, and Effie clung still to the little man's seal-skin cap, as she sat on her cushion of sea-weed, upon the hump on his back; and he marched along, using his flat hands like oars, while the gruff old constable with his sword, and the dolphins and the fishes, great and small, moved beside the pair, and they all went swiftly up from the light to the darker green, the voices growing fainter to Effie, and their forms more indistinct. ”

“ The Revolution, which so filled Webster's eyes, was unquestionably a great historic event by reason of its connection with the formal institution of a new nation; but the roots of our national life were not then planted. They run back to the first settlements and the first charters and agreements; nor is the genesis of the nation to be found there; sharp as are the beginnings of our history on this continent, no student could content himself with a conception of our national life which took into account only the events and conditions determined by the people and the soil of America. ”

“ We cannot believe that this unhistoried continent,—this virgin leaf in the great diary of man’s conquest over the planet, on which our fathers wrote two words of epic grandeur,—Plymouth and Bunker Hill,—is to bear for its colophon the record of men who inherited greatness and left it pusillanimity,—a republic, and made it anarchy—freedom, and were content as serfs,—of men who, born to the noblest estate of grand ideas and fair expectancies the world had ever seen, bequeathed the sordid price of them in gold. ”

“ A good prince does not ask what will be for the interest of a county or small district in his dominions, but what will promote the prosperity of his kingdom. In the same manner, the citizens of this New World should inquire, not what will aggrandize this town or that State, but what will augment the power, secure the tranquillity, multiply the subjects, and advance the opulence, the dignity, and the virtues, of the United States. Self-interest, both in morals and politics, is and ought to be the ruling principle of mankind ”

“ I look upon death so constantly and surely as but a continuation of life (after the glad removal or subsidence of the plethora of flesh which now chokes half the spirit out of us) that I shall be quite willing to send before us such an ambassador as our little angel would be if he goes sooner than we do. At all events, nothing can ever take away from me the joy I have already had in it.” The haunting fear which every young father has at such a time, and which Lowell intimates in these lines, was not made real at once, but the child lived with them only a brief fourteen months. ”

“ The one note always struck by Lowell when he was singing of freedom and democracy was that of the impregnable defence of these great truths in free and conscience-governed character, and it is this note with which his address concludes: “Our healing is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies, or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed by the still small voice that speaks to the conscience and the heart, prompting us to a wider and wiser humanity.” And in testing current views by his unalterable faith in humanity, he cleaves with no uncertain stroke. ”

“ The smoke rose slowly, enveloping him in it, while the Tufters, overcome with grief, forgot their manners, and stood on both legs peering into the smoke. At that moment Rosedrop, with the spirit of Isal, darted into the circle. The Phœnix saw her. [Pg 215]
"Lay the spirit in the nest," said he, and Rosedrop heedless of the fire which burned her beautiful body, laid Isal's spirit in the nest by the Phœnix.
"It is enough!" said the Phœnix. "I am perishing, but another Phœnix shall arise and the spirit of Isal shall live in it. Isal is the Phœnix that is to be. I die but she shall live." ”

“ Intense Federalist as he was, his Federalism agreed with a stout anti-aristocratic spirit; and throughout his work one may detect a confidence in the common sense of the people which was as firm as Franklin's, and was used, in his enthusiasm, to determine questions in language and literature never before brought to such a test. Unquestionably a main source of Webster's strength and success lay in this democratic instinct; it was not patriotism alone, it was the spirit which hailed the new democracy, and in its very contempt of precedent and historic authority disclosed its rude self-reliance. ”

“ The shock of this rupture left not a shade of reproach for the girl in Lowell’s mind, but it broke up the fountains of the deep in his own life. He was scarcely more than a boy in years, but he had in temperament and capacity for emotion a far greater maturity. He could write of himself a few years later: “Brought up in a very reserved and conventional family, I cannot in society appear what I really am. I go out sometimes with my heart so full of yearning toward my fellows that the indifferent look with which even entire strangers pass me brings tears to my eyes.” ”

“ I like America better every day.” The picturesqueness soon satisfied, and he shows in this despatch how his mind dwelt rather on the life which gave rise to and was typified in the ceremonial. He read it not at all as a supercilious American, whose pride in the barrenness of show at home might be as great as Castilian pride in superfluity of decoration, but as a scholar intent on discovering those fundamental truths of history which are seen all the more clearly through the medium of a mind at home in the rarefied air of a genuine American freedom. ”

“ For it is the glory of nature that in her least part she gives us all, and in that simple love-token of hers we may behold the type of all her sublime mysteries; as in the least fragment of the true artist we discern the working of the same forces which culminate gloriously in a Hamlet or a Faust. We would no longer see the spirit of our people held up as a mirror to the Old World ”

“ He quotes the recommendation of a friend that he should read poetry, feed himself on bee bread so that he might get into the mood of writing poetry; but, though all his life long Lowell fed, as by the most natural appetite, on poetry and other forms of imaginative literature, his own poetry is not bookish, nor does it borrow in form or phrase. Even when most impressionable in his youth, the influence upon him of Keats and Tennyson was more obvious than that of Shakespeare or Marlowe, only because, eschewing the imitative, his verse took the color of his generation. ”

“ Their vitality is the vitality not of one or another blood or tongue, but of human nature; their truth is not topical and transitory, but of universal acceptation; and thus all great authors seem the coevals not only of each other, but of whoever reads them, growing wiser with him as he grows wise, and unlocking to him one secret after another as his own life and experience give him the key, but on no other condition.”
Now Lowell’s own interest in literature had been direct. It would be idle to say that literature was interesting or valuable to him only so far as it was a criticism of life. ”

“ Our literature has developed itself out of English literature, as our political forms have developed themselves out of English political forms, but with a difference. Not as parasitic plants fed from the parent stock, but only as new growths from seeds the mother tree has dropped, could they have prospered as they have done. And so our literature is a part of English literature and must always continue to be so, but, as I have said, with a difference. What that difference is, it would be very hard to define, though it be something of which we are very sensible when we read an American book. ”

“ Leaving the sin of it to God, I believed and still believe that slavery is the Achilles heel of our polity: that it is a temporary and false supremacy of the white races, sure to destroy that supremacy at last, because an enslaved people always prove themselves of more enduring fibre than their enslavers, as not suffering from the social vices sure to be engendered by oppression in the governing class. Against these and many other things I thought all honest men should protest. ”

“ When I was in Spain I saw reason to think that the decay of that noble nation, due, no doubt, to many causes, was due above all to a Civil Service like our own that had gone farther on the inevitable road which ours is going.
“It should seem that a reform like ours, so reasonable, so convenient, so economical, would at once commend itself to the good sense of the people. And I think there are manifest signs that it is more and more so commending itself. The humanity of our day is willing (as our ancestors were not) that the state should support its inefficient members. ”

“ Lowell herself plainly had but a humble conceit of her poetic gift, and it does not appear that poetry was an abundant resource with her. But art there is of no mean order in this little book. It is a delicate instrument on which she plays; there are not many stops, but there is a vibrant tone which thrills the ear. Tenderness indeed is the prevailing note, but in one poem, “Africa,” there is a massiveness of structure, and a sonorous dignity of measure which appeal powerfully to the imagination. ”

“ It is a spectacle portentous of moral lapse and social disorganization, to see a statesman, who has had fifty years’ experience of American politics, quibbling in defence of Executive violence against a free community, as if the conscience of the nation were no more august a tribunal than a police justice sitting upon a paltry case of assault.... ”

“ There is something epic in the gray procession of aqueduct arches across the Campagna. They seem almost like the building of Nature, and are worthy of men whose eyes were toned to the proportions of an amphitheatre of mountains and of a city which received tribute from the entire world. Exceeding beautiful are the mountains which sentinel Rome,—the purple Alban mount, the gray-peaked Monte Gennaro, the hoary Lionessa, and farther off the blue island-like Soracte. ”