James Russell Lowell

“ It is in the life of its great men that the life and thought of a people becomes statuesque, rises into poetry, and makes itself sound out clearly in rhythm and harmony.
These great persons get all the fame and all the monuments like the generals of armies, though we may lead the forlorn hope, or make a palpitating bridge with our bodies in the trenches. Rank and file may grumble a little—but it is always so, and always must be so. Fame would not be fame if it were or could be divided infinitesimally, and every man get his drachm and scruple. It is good for nothing unless it come in a lump. ”

“ His great snowy mountains perhaps only one man in a century goes to the top of and comes back to tell us how he saw from them at once the two great oceans of Life and Death, the Atlantic out of which we came, the Pacific toward which we tend.
Of the poet we do not ask everything, but the best expression of the best of everything. If a man attain this but once, though only in a frail song, he is immortal; while every one who falls just short of it, if only by a hair’s breadth, is as sure to be forgotten. ”

“ I feel how utterly inadequate any single lecture must be on such a theme, and how impossible it is to say anything about Milton in an hour. I have merely touched upon three or four points that seemed to me most characteristic of his style, for our concern with him is solely as a poet. Yet it would be an unpardonable reticence if I did not say, before I close, how profoundly we ought to reverence the grandeur of the man, his incorruptible love of freedom, his scholarly and unvulgar republicanism, his scorn of contemporary success, his faith in the future and in God, his noble frugality of life. ”

“ It is a great wild continent of words ready to be tamed and subjugated, to have its meanings and uses applied. The prose writer finds there his quarry and his timber; but the poet enters it like Orpheus, and makes its wild inmates sing and dance and keep joyous time to every wavering fancy of his lyre.
All language is dead invention, and our conversational currency is one of shells like that of some African tribes—shells in which poetic thoughts once housed themselves, and colored with the tints of morning. But the poet can give back to them their energy and freshness ”

“ It was impossible that anything truly great—great, I mean, on the moral and emotional as well as on the intellectual sides—could be produced in such a generation. But something intellectually great could be, and was. The French mind, always stronger in the perceptive and analytic than in the imaginative faculty, loving precision, grace, and fineness, had brought wit and fancy, and the elegant arts of society, to the perfection, almost, of science. Its ideal in literature was to combine the appearance of carelessness and gayety of thought with intellectual exactness of statement. ”

“ For the eye is an outpost of the brain, and wears its livery oftener than that of the character. But the temperament, the deep human nature, the aboriginal emotions, these utter themselves in the voice. It is only by the ear that the true mother-tongue that knows the short way to the heart is learned. I do not believe that a man born deaf could understand Shakspeare, or sound anything but the edges and shores of Lear’s tempestuous woe. I think that the great masters of speech have hunted men and not libraries, and have found the secret of their power in the street and not upon the shelf. ”

“ The light of the soul that shines through her countenance, that “light that never was on land or sea,” is mingled with the warm glow from the fireside on the hearth of Home. Indeed, may it not be attributed to the Teutonic heart as something peculiar to it, that it has breadth enough to embrace at once the chimney-corner and the far-reaching splendors of Heaven? Happy for it when the smoke and cookery-steam of the one do not obscure the other!
I find no fault with the author of Piers Ploughman for not being a poet. Every man cannot be a poet (fortunately) , nor every poet a great one. ”

“ But when he is describing anything that he loves, here is an inexpressible tenderness, as if his eyes filled with tears. His narrative flows on like one of our inland rivers, sometimes hastening a little, and in its eddies seeming to run sunshine; sometimes lingering smoothly, while here and there a beautiful quiet thought, a pure feeling, a golden-hearted verse opens as quietly as a water-lily, and makes no ripple. In modern times the desire for startling expression is so strong that people hardly think a thought is good for anything unless it goes off with a pop like a gingerbeer cork. ”

“ We prize the first poems as we do snowdrops, not only for their own intrinsic beauty, but even more for that force of heart and instinct of sunshine in them which brings them up, where grass is brown and trees are bare, the outposts and forlorn hopes of spring. There never comes anything again like a first sensation, and those who love Chaucer, though they may have learned late to do it, cannot help imaginatively antedating their delight, and giving him that place in the calendar of their personal experience which belongs to him in the order of our poetic history. ”

“ It is something to be thought of, that all the great poets have been good men. He who translates the divine into the vulgar, the spiritual into the sensual, is the reverse of a poet.
It seems to be thought that we have come upon the earth too late; that there has been a feast of the imagination formerly, and all that is left for us is to steal the scraps. We hear that there is no poetry in railroads, steamboats, and telegraphs, and especially in Brother Jonathan. If this be true, so much the worse for him. But, because he is a materialist, shall there be no poets? ”

“ He it was who first made public opinion a power in the State by condensing it into a song. The invention of printing, by weakening the faculty of memory, and by transferring the address of language from the ear to the eye, has lessened the immediate power of the poet. A newspaper may be suppressed, an editor may be silenced, every copy of an obnoxious book may be destroyed, but in those old days when the minstrels were a power, a verse could wander safely from heart to heart and from hamlet to hamlet as unassailable as the memories on which it was imprinted. ”

“ It is an epithet we give endearingly and not as supposing any decrepitude or senescence in them. Like all true poetry, they are not only young themselves, but the renewers of youth in us; they do not lose, but accumulate, strength and life. A true poem gets a part of its inspiring force from each generation of men. The great stream of Homer rolls down to us out of the past, swollen with the tributary delight and admiration of the ages. ”

“ Then we can narrow our definition yet farther, and say that Fancy [Pg 18] and Wit appear to the artificial man; Imagination and Humor to the natural man. Thus each of us in his dual capacity can at once like Chaucer and Pope, Butler and Jean Paul, and bury the hatchet of one war of tastes.
And now, finally, what is the secret of the great poet’s power over us? There is something we love better than love, something that is sweeter to us than riches, something that is more inspiring to us than success—and that is the imagination of them. ”

“ The imagination has touched that word “alien,” and in it we see the field through Ruth’s eyes, as she looked round on the hostile spikes, and not through those of the poet.
Imagination enters more or less into the composition of all great minds, all minds that have what we call breadth as distinguished from mere force or acuteness. We find it in philosophers like Plato and Bacon, in discoverers like Kepler and Newton, in fanatics like George Fox, and in reformers like Luther. ”

“ But Chaucer reflected life in its large sense—the life of men, from the knight to the ploughman. Thus it is that he always quietly and naturally rises above the Conventional into the Universal. And so his great poem lives forever in that perennial contemporaneousness which is the great privilege of genius. Thus the man of genius has a double immortality—in heaven and on earth at the same time; and this is what makes it good to be a genius at all, that their beauty and their goodness live after them, and every generation of men can say of them—They are our friends also. ”

“ It is very possible that the women of Pope’s time were as bad as they could be, but if God made poets for anything it was to keep alive the traditions [Pg 163] of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful. I grant the influence of the age, but there is a sense in which the poet is of no age, and Beauty, driven from every other home, will never be an outcast and a wanderer while there is a poet-nature left; will never fail of the tribute at least of a song. It seems to me that Pope had a sense of the nice rather than of the beautiful. His nature delighted in the blemish more than in the charm. ”

“ Instead of Fancy we have Feeling; and, what more especially deserves notice, there is almost an entire want of that sense of form and outline and proportion which alone brings anything within the province of Art. Imagination shows itself now and then in little gleams and flashes, but always in the form of Humor. For the basis of the Anglo-Saxon mind is beef and beer; what it considers the real as distinguished from, or rather opposed to, the ideal. It spares nothing merely because it is beautiful. ”

“ Or is it that the spirit of man, of every race of men, has its fatal ebbs and floods, its oscillations between the fluid ideal and the solid matter-of-fact, so that the doubtful line of shore between is in one generation a hard sandy actuality, with only such resemblances of beauty as a dead sea-moss here and there, and in the next is whelmed with those graceful curves of ever-gaining, ever-receding foam, and that dance of joyous spray which knows not, so bright is it, whether it be sea or sunshine. ”

“ The lines of Dante seem to answer his every mood: sometimes they have the compressed implacability of his lips, sometimes they ring like an angry gauntlet thrown down in defiance, and sometimes they soften or tremble as if that stern nature would let its depth of pity show itself only in a quiver of the voice; but always and everywhere there is subordination, and the pulse of the measure seems to keep time to the footfall of the poet along his fated path, as if a fate were on the verses too. ”

“ The most fatal ill-success is to almost succeed, as, in Italy, the worst lemons are those large ones which come nearest to being oranges. The secret of permanent fame is to express some idea the most compactly, whether in your life, your deed, or your writing. I think that if anything is clear in history, it is that every idea, whether in morals, politics, or art, which is laboring to express itself, feels of many men and throws them aside before it finds the one in whom it can incarnate itself. ”

“ Moreover, the Review of the ballad-singer was in the faces of his ring of hearers, in whose glow or chill he could read at a glance a criticism from which there was no appeal. It was not Smith or Brown, but the human heart that judged him.
Doubtless another advantage of these old poets was their out-of-door life. They went from audience to audience on foot, and had no more cramped a study than the arch of heaven, no library but clouds, streams, mountains, woods, and men. There is something more in sunshine than mere light and heat. ”

“ While we wonder at the prophetic imagination of those heroic souls who could see in the little Mayflower the seeds of an empire, while we honor (as it can only truly be honored—by imitating) that fervor of purpose which could give up everything for principle, let us be thankful that they had also that manly English sense which refused to sacrifice their principles to the fantasy of every wandering Adoniram or Shear-Jashub who mistook himself for Providence as naturally and as obstinately as some lunatics suppose themselves to be tea-pots. ”

“ There was something rocky and unyielding in his mind; something that, if we found it in a man we did not feel grateful to and respect, we should call hard. Even his fancy sometimes is glittering and stiff, like crystallizations in granite. But at other times how tender and delicate and dewy from very contrast, like harebells growing in a crag-cleft!
There seem to have been two distinct natures in him—Wordsworth the poet, and Wordsworth the man who used to talk about Wordsworth the poet. ”